How to implement Microsoft Power BI with your accounting software

Power BI is a software application from Microsoft, which allows businesses to picture their data and gain operational insights, by creating reports, dashboards, and visualisations.

One of the main benefits of Power BI is that it can connect to various data sources. This makes it an incredibly powerful tool for businesses who want a complete overview of their activity, across various channels and departments.

From CRMs and sales systems to HR and payroll, Power BI can sync all your business data into a single view, making it easier to gain the insight required for impactful decision-making.

If Power BI is a consolidated source of data visualisation, why does your individual finance software matter?

Many people using Power BI will be doing so with a lot of administrative effort.

Yes, the output looks visually impressive – but this is a data manipulation tool, not a data sourcing tool. It can only visualise the data that you provide it with. If the available data is sparse, Power BI can only provide a limited view.

Many finance systems are relatively closed off to users and require data to be physically fed into external systems. This means that somebody in the finance team will need to manually update a spreadsheet, figure by figure, so Power BI can read it.

Not only does this require countless hours of the finance team’s time to facilitate, but – by the time a Power BI chart is analysed – the supplied data is likely to be out of date. It’s improbable that a human would be fast enough to curate it in real-time and, as a result, there’s a significant lag between business activity and reactive decision-making.

Manual submission of data into Power BI doesn’t just create a delay between evidence and action. Human error is almost inescapable with this method, leading to inaccuracies and trickle-down misinterpretation.

Ultimately, if the data visualisations served by Power BI aren’t accurate, it doesn’t really matter if they look impressive. They can’t provide the facts needed to facilitate crucial business decisions.

Cloud finance software facilitates the sharing of transparent, accurate and useful data between systems.

Cloud software runs on remote servers, instead of local hardware. This allows users to access the software from any location, using any internet-connected device.

As a result, cloud software systems are extremely useful for tasks such as file sharing, collaboration, and project management; they can be accessed from anywhere in the world, at any time.

Better yet, virtually all true cloud systems have an API which enables them to connect with other systems.

An API (Application Programming Interface) refers to the various means one software system has of communicating with another piece of software, . By extension, an ‘open’ API makes it possible for software from different providers to communicate with each other, without needing human intervention.

By using an open API, cloud finance software can autonomously feed data into systems like Power BI, without any delay or risk of typing errors. You can trust that the information is accurate, up-to-date, and ready for analysis, without requiring hours of manual data manipulation to achieve a less reliable result.

iplicit is the key to untapping real insight from your finance data.

iplicit is a true cloud software solution that leverages an open API to integrate with other systems. You can easily link it with Power BI, so data flows seamlessly and autonomously.

However, iplicit is different from other cloud finance systems on the market. It offers unlimited general ledger analysis dimensions, so you can explore your financial data at the most granular level - unleashing far greater potential to provide insight, spot patterns and trends.

Data dimensions are the various ways in which data can be categorised. For example, data could be classified by time, geography, or product type. By understanding the different dimensions of data, businesses can more effectively analyse and interpret their information; and the more dimensions you have access to, the deeper that that analysis can go.

By using iplicit’s unlimited data dimensions, a tool like Power BI can help you to visualise even the most complex data sets and leverage them to make informed decisions, importantly without the need for your finance team to extract, filter and pivot data that feeds into your analysis tools.

Not only is this far more reliable than cross-referencing manual data, but it provides far greater real time depth than other cloud finance systems with far more limited dimensions. With the added potential and power to then combine data from across your business systems meaning those company wide dashboards and visual aids can become a reality

For ultimate insight - right down to transaction level, even across multiple legal entities - it can only be iplicit.

We can show you how iplicit works with just a 5-minute demo. To arrange yours, get in touch today.