Those that have looked at Microsoft’s business intelligence products have likely seen Power BI before. Indeed, the «BI» in the product name stands for «business intelligence.» Since its release in 2011, Power BI has become one of the world’s leading ways to view data, analyze it, and make better business decisions based on that information. However, Power BI is so much more than just a pretty data visualization engine – it’s an entire ecosystem for understanding business insights.

If you’re looking to gain insight into your business, here’s what Power BI is and how it can help your company!

The Power BI Ecosystem

Power BI is not a single program. Instead, it’s an entire ecosystem that has multiple components. The four most common ones that people use are:

• Desktop: The desktop application designs and publishes reports to the online service. With this desktop application, users can create integrations with data sets and also create rich visualizations.
• Online: PowerBI.com is where users can view and create Power BI reports. You’ll be able to see reports that others in your organization have produced. If your business involves releasing public data sets, you can also make public reports that you can share with others.
• Mobile: Microsoft has produced mobile apps for Android and iOS that let you view reports and dashboards on your phone. You can get real-time business insights on the go with these apps!
• Gateways: Power BI also has the concept of gateways that sync data from various sources. These gateways are also responsible for automatically refreshing data to ensure that it doesn’t get stale.

There are also other components, like the marketplace. However, the four above are arguably the ones that most companies and users will use regularly.

How Can This Software Help My Business?

Visualizing data is often one of the best ways to spot trends and directions. For example, seeing daily or monthly revenue, as well as hotspots for that revenue (maybe you’re selling a lot in the California market but not in Texas), can help inform investment decisions. If you’re selling well in one market, it may make sense to invest there to keep that interest for your product high!

Power BI also lets users filter and sort data. So when you see a revenue chart, you’re not necessarily limited to just revenue. You can add optional filters. For example, you might have «revenue by country» or «revenue by state.» These filters let you deep-dive into the data to understand your customers in new ways.

One of the neatest aspects of this platform is that you can filter the entire report, and have multiple filters all at once. Let’s say you have a dashboard with your revenue, number of sales, and sales location. Assuming you have this information, you could add filters for referral sources (Facebook, Google, etc.), date, and existing vs. new customers. Then, you can use Power BI to understand your revenue and other metrics from new Facebook customers two days ago. Or, you can use your dashboard to see how that recapture campaign on Google is going by looking at your revenue for the past week for existing customers from Google.

It’s not hard to see how having such clarity can make business decisions easier!

Let Us Help You Gain Clarity for Your Data

If you’re looking to gain valuable insights and clarity into your data, please contact us! At INVID Group, we have extensive experience with Power BI and would be happy to help build the system you need to answer your business’ most pressing questions!