All companies face constant pressure to increase profitability, improve cash flow, reduce costs, and reduce risk in order to improve financial performance. The ability to make good decisions and proactively solve issues is crucial to success at every level of an organization, every day. And as smaller companies grow or face stiffer competition, the need to make these decisions based on meaningful information quickly becomes an imperative.  This is where traditional financial reports, summaries that are not drillable and manually-manipulated spreadsheets start to fall short. ‘Loose’ Excel spreadsheet use in particular becomes potentially dangerous as the trustworthiness and timeliness of information comes into question. BI can provide real-time automated reports, executable at the click of a button, which draw up-to-date trusted data directly from a company’s existing accounting package and deliver a single version of the truth. Even better is when the data is delivered in pre-formatted Excel reports and dashboards that can be drilled down into for transactional details. Excel-based BI allows small businesses to continue to use Excel as their preferred data sharing application but eliminates ‘spreadsheet chaos’. No more cutting and pasting repetitively, no more human error, no more doubt about data accuracy. BI paves the way for true collaboration across a business so more people have access to information they need to make better decisions, faster.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 25th, 2010 at 9:04 pm and is filed under Business Intelligence. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.