Dashboards, Reporting & Business Intelligence

There’s no escaping it: these are tough economic times. Everywhere you go you hear about how bad the economy is doing, whether it’s news about the stock market, another major company in trouble, or the credit crisis. Making your business successful in times like these may sound like a daunting task, but with the help of business intelligence software, your company can still thrive.

The success of your business in any economy relies on a lot more than some data and statistics, but what you do with that data can greatly improve your company. The performance of your company is only as good as the performance of your projects, so having the data to analyze the performance and management of your projects is essential. Business intelligence software allows you to track the performance of your projects and make decisions for your company that will improve both the day-to-day tasks and the overall organization of the company. With the right information, you can make your projects and your company more efficient, focused, and successful, regardless of the economy.

For some companies, being able to see the relationship between differing sets of data is just as important as the data itself. As business intelligence software continues to improve, the ability to analyze those data relationships is also improving. Using business intelligence to understand the complete picture, rather than just the separate pieces, is another tool to stay competitive in a tough economy and keep your business on the path to success.

All of that data isn’t very useful if the software interface isn’t very functional. Many business intelligence software companies are now offering Rich Internet Applications to improve that functionality. Features of such software often include web dashboards, interactive web reports, and the ability to automatically generate spreadsheets that everyone is familiar with.

Don’t let a volatile economy affect the success of your company. Business intelligence software is a key element to guiding your business through the coming months and years, improving performance, and keeping your company focused.

Dear Consultants, Developers and all readers,

Here is an interesting thought and let me know if it chimes well with you.

I believe the following idea if implemented could give a significant advantage and boost your marketability.

Now, everybody has a resume or a CV, well ofcourse,this is the first step you execute when you step out of college.

All of us store our resume in a more or less standard Doc format, so how about having an online version of your resume?

Sounds interesting?

This online version would be just a single web page having your resume content. You can either put a summary of your resume or complete details if you like.

So what will a single page resume serve for?

When I suggest someone to start their own blog, I see lot of enthusiasm but no follow through. Few of the main reasons cited is “Don’t know what to write about” or simply “Have no time” or “Is it worth investing the time?”

Creating a single page blog is just the beginning and helps in breaking the inertia. Once you create your resume blog, the web-url becomes your signature URL and you can put this URL back on your resume or when you update your CV on job sites like Monster or Dice.

Appsbi.com started as a professional journal and it has become modestly huge than I orginally thought of. But it did not happen overnight. No big success happens overnight unless you have a Genie in a bottle. But interestingly all successes appeart to be an overnight success, isn’t it?

Start small, take the first step and do it now

Appsbi.com has tremendously helped me for my consulting career and is now helping as a marketing engine for InfoCaptor

Similarly, I believe that creating your own blog will help you in one way or the other, if not today then sometime in future.

The blog that you will create will act as one of the building block in your career.

Now let us attack the negatives or the holding back thoughts

“Don’t know what to write about”

Just make it your online professional journal. Start by putting up your resume online and slowly add more pages. Don’t feel pressurised to add more contents. Just add what comes naturally to you. Don’t worry about things like “is it worth posting”. Even if you have a small piece of code or found a new technique, just post it.

You should keep personal stuff out and stick with work related things. Better have a seperate personal blog.

“Have no time”

It would take 5 minutes to create a blog and add your resume to it. Then add a weekly recap of your work related things to it. This would take another 15 minutes. If weekly is too much then stick with bi-weekly or monthly. Is the initial 5 minutes and 15 minutes / week or /month asking too much?

“Is it worth investing the time?”

Do you call 15 minutes/month investment of time? You will eventually know if it is worth the time if you stick to it.

So where do you begin?

Create a blogger account http://www.blogger.com , pick appropriate blog name and add your first post right now within 5 minutes.

Blogger is a free service by Google.

Another free service similar to blogger is to create an account at http://wordpress.com/

Let me know if this is a good idea and if you really followed through send me your blog url by commenting to this post.

Quickbooks is a very popular “micro ERP” application and dominates the Small Business Market. One of the benefits of using Quickbooks for my own business is the simplicity and ease of use. You can run a report and from the report you can drill down straight to the transactions. I learnt a lot of things using quickbooks just by running reports, finding the reported amount in the wrong account, I would then drill down straight to the transactions, change the account, and when I refresh the report …boom.. I can see my changes. Instant productivity!

In one of the surveys it was mentioned, most of the new Small business’s fail not because of their execution or anything else but because the owner never realized where the problem is. To keep track of your business, you need to actively monitor who is your top customer, what is your open account receivables, what is your inventory etc.

Sure, all of this information is available right in Quickbooks but the problem is you need to run seperate reports to get all these informations. So lets say it typically takes 5 mins to run a typical report and if the business owner where to run say 10 different reports on a daily basis that itself accounts to a precious 50 mins of his/her time.

This is a big pain and the most painful part is that this is a tough part to comprehend, understand and implement for a small business owner.

My company produces this Dashboard Designer for small businesses but never realized the fact or the thought never occurred until one of the clients asked us the question “Can you create Dashboards on top of Quickbooks?”

Then the journey began…some research…and after few technical hickups we finally managed to create some sample dashboards on top of Quickbooks with Real time data.

The below screenshot is for Expense Analisys Dashbaord

The above dashboard is very dynamic. You can change the period type to Year,Quarter, Month, week or Days. The first chart shows the Expense trending by period, instantly tells you how you are managing your expenses.

The 2nd chart tells the Average Expense/Day which is an interesting KPI and the remaining two charts show the expense by payee (vendor) and by Account.

Now take a look at the below Sales Dashboard

here is the chart listing
“Sales by Period” (Year, Quarter, Month, Week, Days)
“Average Sales/Day”
“Top 10 Customers”
“Top 10 Products”
“COGS by Period”

Dashboards for Small Business – Solution and Price perfect

This is a very good interview with Mukesh Ambani. It is really inspiring and eye-opener in the way how Reliance has been the pioneer in so many things. It is really exciting to know that Mukesh Ambani graduated from UDCT which is just opposite to where I graduated from(VJTI). He was also among the IIT toppers. IIT is one of the most prestigious universities in India and I remember how I was once desperate to get into that but destiny had its own way and inspite of my 2 attempts never cleared the joint entrance exam.