Business Intelligence for the Excel User and Accountant

Over the last few posts, we looked at Business Intelligence and an example of how it can be used in a small business. But is Business Intelligence for the Excel User? And does it have anything to do with Accountants? ( missed the first post, you can access it here. You can also access the second post here)

Business Intelligence for the Excel User

In every organization I have visited or worked at, Excel is used by most employees at some level. Senior-level employee, marketing, sales, finance, and accounting. Everyone uses Excel. Like it or not, no matter how much money companies spend on powerful software packages, people tend to dump data from the software into excel for slicing, dicing, analyzing and reporting (I bet you are guilty of this too!). Even worse, each person and each department have their own set of reports. From all these reports that are produced, how many of them are actually shared around the company? Or just kept for the use of the employee or the department?

What if you have access to all of these reports? All of these data sets, along with other data sets, both internal and external. What insights could this provide for your organization and your company?

Well, now you do have access because Excel has a suite of tools. Power Tools: Power Query, Power Pivot, and Power View. All work stand alone and, all combined make a very powerful BI system. Business Intelligence for the Excel User!

Let me explain

Power Query can be described as SQL for Excel users (without the need for knowing SQL). It allows users find data from many sources (including big data source), combine data, transform data, and make the data usable for reporting and data analytics.

Power Pivot will allow you to carry out complex calculations across multiple tables of data (using DAX) and model data in a way that is structured for reporting and visualizations.

In Power View, you can quickly create a variety of visualizations, from tables and matrices to bubble charts and sets of small multiple charts. With these visualizations trends in data are easily spotted making business decisions easier and actionable

Business Intelligence and the Accountant

'What’s all this got to do with the Accountant?' I hear you say! Plenty. For years now accountants have been rationalizing data. Making sense of the numbers. Producing reports to explain the story. This places accountants in a prime position to recognize data that is useful, data that can help align business with its strategic plan. Then analyze that data and report on it.

Accountants are already Excel users. New software is just a barrier right! Why fix what’s not broken! Excels BI tools are not a new software to learn. THIS is just an extension to the tools Accountants already have.

I am here to help. Below you will find links to my Power Courses (Each of these BI tools can be used in isolation, therefore we have a course for each). If you want to provide business intelligence services in your organization, now is the time to upskill.

Sound’s interesting - I would like to preview Power Query

I’m curious - tell me more about Power Pivot

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Business Intelligence for the Excel user and accountant brings the power of data to the ordinary business.

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If you are still not convinced you to need to learn Excel Power Tools, why don't you check out these demonstrations and watch Excel Power Tools in Action
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