Kick your AccountMate reports up a notch with Power BI
Power BI is indeed a powerful business intelligence tool from Microsoft. It integrates with AccountMate to let you easily visualize and share your company’s data.
By putting more of your AccountMate data to work for you, Power BI lets you quickly hone in on actionable insights—while you keep tabs on new trends and make better decisions.
You’ll save time and money too, since creating a fully custom Power BI report typically takes us or you less than half the time needed to create the same report in AccountMate.
A Power BI dashboard is a great “data doodler”
It’s not really a report writer, it’s an interactive tool to look at your data from different angles—that you get to change and control on the fly.
Each dashboard is a single-page “canvas” that shows highlights from your current data. It summarizes the story in your data and lets you answer questions and monitor what’s most important. If you want more granularity, just click to drill down into the details of an individual report that feeds the dashboard.
Consolidate any types of data into a dashboard:
- Executive “Key Performance Indicators” dashboard
- Profit margin analysis dashboard
- Sales orders by product line, by region, by period
- The very latest sales commission numbers
- Inventory turnover rate dashboard
- Or whatever else you want to manage
5 cool examples of what you can do with Power BI
1. Have everything organized for you in one place
Suppose you’re an accountant with four daily reports to crosscheck. With Power BI you can have quick easy access to all four reports in one dashboard every time, and not have to spend time running and managing multiple reports in AccountMate.
2. Link to your AccountMate data
Power BI links directly to your AccountMate data. Reports can be built to refresh data in real-time—or to allow you the flexibility to schedule refreshes according to your need.
3. Slice and dice your data visually
Your reports can interact in unison. For example, a comparison report can be set up to let you choose any customer from a customer balance report and automatically filter down to all of the customer’s open invoices in real time.
You can even do the same thing with visualizations like pie charts, scatter plots and much more. Interact with your data how you want to.
4. Tweak reports yourself
Tired of having to ask a programmer every time you want to tweak a report? Even non-technical users can quickly learn how to customize their own reports with a few mouse clicks, and NexLAN will always still be there for any trickier jobs you might need some help with.
5. Ask questions in Power BI
The Microsoft Power Insight tool automatically analyzes your data to provide useful insights as data snippets and reports. Ask it questions like:
- “Which region has the highest sales in December?”
- “Which product line has the best profit margin this year?”
- “Which item has the biggest customer-to-price ratio?”
Ask inventory control questions, too:
- “How many items are on hand?”
- “How many sold this month vs. last month?”
- “Which warehouses are out of stock on this item?”
- “Which customers were shipped items from this lot?”
How Power BI works with AccountMate
Power BI runs in an Office 365 environment separately from AccountMate. NexLAN will integrate Power BI with your AccountMate database to work with your AccountMate modules. Any user member from your team can access the Power BI workspace from their computer, tablet or phone.
Power BI isn’t meant to replace your favorite AccountMate reports. Instead it provides you with another easy-to-use, easy-to-customize tool that can also cleanly export to other Microsoft programs like Excel and Access.
Power BI versus other reporting options for AccountMate
1. AccountMate comes with hundreds of built-in reports. For details read our article, The Trees in the Forest of Reports. AccountMate reports can be customized, and custom reports unique to your business can be created too.
Power BI is different from built-in AccountMate reports because it can combine data across different modules with ease.
2. F9 from Infor is a popular add-on that dynamically links your AccountMate GL to Excel. Just hit your F9 key to pull in the latest current GL data from AccountMate into Excel with all the right formatting—no more re-keying of data. For details and a short video demo, check out NexLAN’s F9 overview.
Power BI is different from F9 in that it pulls data from the operational modules (AR, AP, IC, PO, SO).
The total cost of Power BI is less than getting custom AccountMate reports made or using F9. And with an Office 365 subscription, Power BI is only $10/month per user at the time of this writing, and can be implemented by NexLAN in your system in less than a day!