Picture it, you are working in a local practice, you have several clients who have heard of Power BI, they are asking about dashboards.
You want to deliver, but you are struggling to keep up with the existing workload, let alone trying to figure out how to satisfy this new hunger for more and better information.
So, one weekend you sit down and research dashboards. Microsoft has a business intelligence / dashboarding tool called Power BI. Even better – you can download it for free. This is just what you are looking for! And then the fun starts: you go through a few courses and work with some demo data and get a few nice-looking dashboards up and running.
That was one whole weekend gone, fun but time consuming!
So now you know there are some great tools out there, you have learnt a bit of dax (data analysis expressions – a Microsoft language), and understand the concept of time intelligence. You have made some attractive visualisations. Dax was hard, really hard, but with practice you see there will be progress. You have a keen desire to learn more, and you really want to satisfy your clients. Your colleagues also have clients that are asking for more useful and interesting reports, and dashboards seem to be in demand.
You can see that by categorising your clients into their different branches you could create some standard dashboard packages for each branch. This would be an efficient way of creating a baseline to build on for each client.
These packages could include some standard financial indicators, some sales related indicators and some industry specific KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Trends, benchmarks, key figures, and deviations would all be included, as well as information on the sales pipeline, work in progress & a forecast.
Being able to provide clients with some useful management information you can drill down into together should promote some healthy discussions about where the business is headed and what opportunities or threats are out there to grab or avoid.
These are great ideas, and very relevant in today’s age of accountants expected to become tomorrow’s trusted advisors. You speak to others in the practice and get buy-in from the senior partners that you can spend a bit of time on implementing your idea.
This is where the challenges begin
You realise that if you are going to standardise and productise a set of industry specific dashboards for clients who are spread over a range of accounting systems there is a big mountain to climb.
You need to figure out how to integrate all this data from all these different systems and make a data layer (or data model) that will enable you to build some attractive and optimised dashboards. You are not a developer, but you love working with the data, so you start looking into it.
You realise that working with this live data is much more complex than you expected
