What use is information if it’s hard to understand, hard to communicate, and hard to share with the people that need it, when they need it the most?
To make smart, informed business decisions, you need rich, up-to-date, and accurate financial information. To complete the picture, understanding, communicating and sharing this information is just as important.
I’m extremely pleased to announce that Xero’s integration with Power BI is now available.
What is Power BI?
Power BI is a business analytics tool, used to analyze data and share insights. It’s perfectly suited for any business, or accountants and bookkeepers looking to provide business advice to their clients. Power BI enables you to monitor business performance and get answers quickly, with rich analytics available on every device.
As a Chartered Accountant, the Power BI integration is a personal favourite of mine. I’ve always been passionate about helping businesses succeed, and would spend hours manually manipulating data to find the opportunities that would help them get ahead. Using Xero and Power BI makes this process easy. As an accountant or bookkeeper, you can now provide high value services with confidence to all of your clients, knowing the insights are current and accurate.
Xero Content Pack
With the Xero content pack for Power BI, you can see your data in a format that makes sense, and can analyze it with greater speed, efficiency, and understanding. You can create visualizations for the most commonly tracked small business metrics including cash position, revenue vs. expenses, profit/loss trend, and return on investment.
You can drill down more specifically to uncover insights like your best performing products or services, or see where your time is best spent, with important actionable items being presented front and centre. All the information in Power BI is dynamic, surfacing what’s important and giving you the power to dive into the detail.
Using Power BI – Inventory Report
Understanding who your best customers are, or finding out what products or services are in demand, are important cues that tell you a lot about your business, and are a great catalyst for business improvement. They get you thinking;
Why are they your best customer? What do they buy, and when do they buy it? Do I have lots of great customers, or does my business rely on only a few? And am I exposed as a result, or can I, and how do I, replicate them?
These are all great questions that can be tackled by an accountant or bookkeeper. In Power BI, the Inventory Report, tells you all of this, and more. And the information takes only seconds to present, segment, and surface, so you can better understand how your time and money is best spent to grow your business.
Using Power BI – Action items
What do you do when you start work for the day? What’s the most important thing you should do? Do you have a routine or process you follow?
While the answer to these questions will vary from business to business, there’s time during the day where you’ll need to check in on the following things:
- have your customers paid you?
- what bills do I have to pay today? and
- do I have enough money to pay them?
The Xero Content pack in Power BI has a tile dedicated to Action items. Action Items allow you, at a glance, to get a sense of where things are, and help you understand what things you can do in Xero to bring things up to date. Action Items help you keep your accounting data up to date, so you maximize the value of real time information to impact your business.
With Messages highlighting what you can action, and direct links into Xero, it’s quick and easy to “tick” things off and bring things up to date. And get back to running your business, completely up to date.
View your business data across your applications
It doesn’t stop there, Power BI extends a small business owners and accountants view beyond Xero, and allows them to easily view the Xero data alongside front-office data, including Dynamics CRM, Mailchimp, Salesforce, Google Analytics, Zendesk and Stripe. All of your critical business data in one place.
Quick sign up
There’s many other examples of how Power BI can assist you make smart business decisions, and they can be explored in minutes, not hours.
If you’re new to Power BI, setting up is super easy and super fast. In fact, it would have to rank as one of the fastest sign up processes I’ve ever experienced. Enter and verify your email address, connect a Xero organisation to Power BI, which only takes a few clicks, and your first dashboard is available and ready to go.
Here at Xero we’re always looking at ways to make it easier for our customers and partners to make more money with less effort, and this partnership is a great example of this.
All the hard work is done, all you have to do now is sign up.
Power BI + Xero combines the scale of Microsoft-supported analytics with the approachability of the global-leader in small business accounting.- Amanda Aguillard, Aguillard Accounting
If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave them below. Our team at Xero would really like to hear from you and your experience using Xero and Power BI.
Thanks.
