For every business, data plays a critical role when it comes to developing strategies and making decisions. Similarly, businesses providing financial services are using business intelligence (BI) and analytics to understand and take control of the data that flows through their company. Let’s take a look at business intelligence and explore ways in which BI tools, such as Power BI, is helping businesses to make informed decisions.
What is business intelligence and analytics?
Business intelligence (BI) refers to the processes and technologies used by organizations to collect, analyze, and present data, giving them actionable insights to make informed, data-driven decisions. On the other hand, businesses use analytics to know the answer to their ‘why’ questions about historical data. Business intelligence helps you understand what’s happening, whereas analytics enables you to make predictions.
Why choose BI and analytics?
The volume of data that you generate may grow exponentially with the growth of your business, making it difficult for you to manage and analyze it. For this reason, you might miss out on the opportunity to gain actionable insights that help you to transform your business for the better. Fortunately, Power BI provides easy access to all your data in one place, improving collaboration, efficiency, and productivity among various departments.
Significance of Power BI
Power BI is an easy-to-use analytics tool that helps businesses to generate thorough reports and gain valuable insights from their data, whether it’s on-premise or on the cloud. In other words, it allows you to look at past and present data and use it to make predictions.
When combined with machine learning, Power BI finds patterns in your data, enabling you to make data-driven decisions. Whether you are running a small-sized business or big enterprise, Power BI facilitates easy implementation without requiring large upfront expenses.
Benefits of Power BI for Finance
Easily store and access your data: Power BI compresses documents to make it easier for you to store, analyze, and visualize massive amounts of data. Moreover, this allows organizations, especially those dealing with a lot of financial information, to perform a comprehensive analysis without cutting down on the datasets. Additionally, you can add new datasets as you discover them, which is useful to handle real-time trading and investment data.
Quickly identify trends in your data: Power BI allows you to view large amounts of data by a wide variety of attributes and dimensions. You can also create dimensions related to other business factors, including sales and revenue, helping you to make accurate comparisons and view trends.
Intuitive with a wide array of functionalities: Power BI’s easy-to-use interface allows businesses to create data visualizations that are visually appealing and easy to interpret, making it simple to communicate valuable insights with everyone in your company. Further, you can also utilize the features available in the Microsoft Office suite of applications, including copy and paste, drag and drop functionality, and easy crop and resize, which helps you to create graphs and charts smoothly.
Access and view data on the go: You can easily create and publish your dashboards and reports after carrying out a thorough analysis of your data. Moreover, unlike other platforms that support putting up the findings online and share the location to your colleague, Power BI enables you to publish and store it in Microsoft cloud service effortlessly. With that, you can streamline the process of publication and distribution, and offer additional features to users, such as personalized dashboards, alerts, natural language query, and more.
Using Power BI in Finance
Business intelligence and analytics are crucial for businesses to make data-driven decisions, giving them an edge over their competition and enhancing their customers’ satisfaction. Power BI offers game-changing features, including intuitive and easy-to-use interface and automated machine learning, to help them find trends and gain actionable insights from their historical data. It allows you to use your data and transform your business.
