What is Power BI and what is it used for?

Power BI is a business analytics platform built by Microsoft. Put simply, it is a tool that takes data from your systems (your accounting software, tills, warehouse, CRM) and turns it into clear reports and charts you can view on a computer or a phone.

The main difference from ordinary reports is that Power BI reports update themselves. There is no need to export data every month, load it into Excel and recalculate formulas: the report fetches the latest data and recalculates on its own.

How Power BI works

The way the platform works can be broken down into three steps.

1. Gathering data. Power BI connects to data sources: an accounting system database, Excel files, SharePoint, a CRM, an ERP or a till system. A single report can combine several different sources.

2. The data model. The gathered data is organised: tables are linked, metrics are calculated (profit margin or average transaction value, for example), and it is defined how figures are grouped by period, department or product group. It is this part that determines whether the reports can be relied on.

3. Reports. The end result is interactive reports with charts and tables. You can filter the data by period, department or sales manager, and click on a figure to see what it is made up of.

What you can analyse with Power BI

In practice, almost any numerical business data. Most companies start with financial and sales metrics:

• revenue and costs month by month, compared with the previous year or the budget;
• profit, profit margin and how they change over time;
• sales by product, customer, department and sales manager;
• receivables and payables, with overdue debts by ageing band;
• stock levels, inventory turnover and slow-moving stock;
• the balance sheet and profit and loss statement, with the option to drill down into the amounts.

Restaurant groups and retail chains also analyse turnover by site and by hour, average transaction value and the cost of sales ratio. There is more on this on the R-Keeper analytics page.

Power BI and Excel: what’s the difference

This is probably the most common question. The same reports can often be built in Excel too, but the amount of work and the reliability differ.

Excel is excellent for one-off analysis. The problems start when the same report has to be prepared every month: someone has to export the data, tidy up the format, update the formulas and check that no errors have crept in. The more data and sources there are, the more time this takes.

Power BI does this work automatically. Once a report has been set up, it updates itself and every member of staff sees the same figures. No more situations where different people come up with different results because they were working from different versions of a file.

The second difference is data volume. Excel starts to struggle once the number of rows runs into the hundreds of thousands; Power BI handles volumes like that without any trouble.

How much does Power BI cost

The cost has two parts, and it is worth keeping them separate.

The Microsoft licence is paid directly to Microsoft for each user who will view the reports.

Report development is the work of combining the data and building the reports. There are two routes here: use a ready-built report package or build a solution from scratch. Ready-built packages for Rivilė and Finvalda users start from €59 a month, while bespoke projects are charged by the hour. All prices are on the pricing page.

In practice, for most companies it is cheaper to start with a ready-built package and adapt only what is missing.

Is the data secure?

Signing in to Power BI requires multi-factor authentication (MFA), data is transmitted over an encrypted connection, and access can be routed through a VPN if needed. Report access rights are set separately, so you can control which employee sees which data.

Where to start

It is worth starting not with the technology but with a question: which figures are you missing when you make decisions? Usually the answer is a handful of specific metrics: profitability by product, late payments, stock levels.

If you use Rivilė, Finvalda or R-Keeper, the quickest route is a ready-built report package, which can be set up within a few days. You can see what these reports look like in the Power BI report examples, and if you need a bespoke solution, we cover that on the Power BI implementation page.