Does your business need business intelligence? When it really pays off

The honest answer to the question “does my business need business intelligence?” is: it depends. A small company whose manager sees every order each day may well manage without a separate analytics system. But once the volume of data grows and decisions start being made “from memory”, the lack of analytics begins to cost money.

Below are the specific signs that tell you your company already needs business intelligence.

Six signs you are missing analytics

1. You wait until the middle of the following month for reports. By the time the accounts team closes the month and prepares the summaries, two weeks have gone by. Decisions are made on out-of-date figures.

2. Every department has its own Excel file. Sales calculate one way, accounts another, and half of every meeting is spent working out which figures are right.

3. You don’t know which products or customers are actually profitable. You can see turnover, but cost of sales, discounts and returns are never brought together in one place.

4. Debts are spotted too late. You find out that a customer has been paying three months late only when the amount has already grown sizeable.

5. Money is sitting in the warehouse. Some products haven’t moved for months, but nobody tracks this systematically because it would mean comparing stock levels with sales by hand.

6. You have several branches and can’t compare them. Each site reports separately, and comparing them on the same measures takes half a day.

If you recognised at least three of these, analytics will most likely pay for itself within a few months.

What business intelligence delivers in practice

The benefit is usually not “nicer-looking reports” but concrete insights that simply weren’t visible before.

One of our clients, who runs several cafés, noticed after the reports were set up that at one site the share of cost of sales (food cost) was markedly higher than at the others, even though the menu was the same. That sort of thing is hard to spot in Excel but easy to see in a table with all the sites side by side.

Other common results:

• Time saved. Reports that a finance employee used to compile by hand every month now generate themselves.
• Problems spotted early. A falling product margin or a growing balance of overdue debts shows up the same week, not a quarter later.
• The same figures for everyone. The manager, the accountant and the sales manager all look at the same source.
• Well-founded planning. Seasonality, the hourly distribution of turnover and customer trends let you plan inventory and shifts on evidence rather than gut feeling.

What it costs to get started

This is where misunderstandings most often arise. Business intelligence doesn’t have to mean an expensive project.

If you use a popular accounting system, a ready-built report package is usually enough: for Rivilė or Finvalda users such packages start at €59 a month and are set up within a few days, because the reports are already built.

A bespoke solution is needed when data comes from several different systems or when you need specific measures; we price those projects by the hour. Details are on the pricing page and the Power BI implementation page.

When you don’t need business intelligence yet

In the interests of honesty: if your company issues barely a dozen or so invoices a month and has a single product, there is most likely no need for a separate analytics system. Analytics pays off where the volume of data exceeds what one person can take in by looking through the records.

The second case is when the data in the accounting system itself is disorganised. If products are entered inconsistently and branches are labelled however each person sees fit, it is worth sorting out the accounting first: analytics will only show you the same mess, just more attractively.

Where to start

Pick the three measures you genuinely lack when making decisions: most often these are profitability by product, overdue debts and sales trends. A ready-built package already includes them.

You can see what such reports look like in our Power BI report examples. If you’d like advice on your own situation, write to us and we’ll tell you whether a ready-built package will do or whether a bespoke solution is worth it.