At Fusion CPA, we understand the need to effectively use data to drive financial decisions. As outsourced controllers with NetSuite credentials, we have helped our clients to utilize Power BI to:
- Understand their expenses better: We can help you track your expenses in real time and identify areas where you can cut costs. We can also help you create reports that show you where your money is going and how you can improve your spending habits.
- Identify financial trends in their business: We can help you track your financial performance over time and identify trends that could impact your business. This information can help you make better decisions about your pricing, marketing, and other business strategies.
- Make better decisions about their future: We can help you use data to make better decisions about your business, such as when to expand, when to hire new employees, and when to invest in new equipment.
How NetSuite Power BI works is simple, yet very effective. Power BI can connect to NetSuite and visualize that data in a variety of ways, making it easy for businesses to track their financial performance, identify trends, and make informed decisions.
Businesses need data to run, and with so much software available in this digital world, more data is being generated now than ever before. The problem is that data is only beneficial to an organization when it can make sense of the information being collected. This is where Microsoft Power BI shines. But what exactly is Microsoft Power BI, and how can it serve your business?
What is Microsoft Power BI
Microsoft Power BI is the name given to a group of cloud-based applications and services that help organizations analyze and manage data from several sources. It’s not just like any software. Power BI is focused on business intelligence and empowers businesses by using data to help you understand your business better. The software provides a holistic view of your business, giving you the tools to look into past performance while allowing you to understand what to improve on at present. This, along with its unique machine learning capabilities – which allow the software to better digest data and present it in a user-friendly manner – enables businesses to make future performance predictions. In the world of accounting, Power BI can spot data patterns, allowing your firm to make data-driven predictions and answer the what-if scenarios.
Outstanding features of Power BI include:
- Monthly product updates
- Custom dashboards and scorecards
- Live up-to-date data insights
- Create informative user-friendly maps of your data
- Microsoft Power BI integrations
- Reporting automation and reports access through the Power BI Mobile app
- Goals/KPIs trackers and alerts triggers
- Unify Financial, Payroll, and other Operational data
- Industry-leading AI
Power BI allows you to clean, find, and collect data from a ton of different sources, presenting it all in one place. You can use that data to make sound business decisions to take your business to the next level or to decipher how to withstand economic challenges. Power BI also allows you to create intelligence reports and aids with financial reporting.
How Microsoft Power BI Can Benefit Your Business
Today, companies use different financial and operational software, where all relevant data exists independently of each other. This can create a challenge for analyzing a company’s performance as it can easily create information silos and render separate versions of the truth. With Microsoft Power BI, you have access to all information in one place. It integrates with NetSuite and Quickbooks, so allows you to access all relevant info in one place. 
Real-time insights: The software provides real-time insights into your business data. This means you can see how your business is performing right now, without having to wait for reports to be generated.
Interactive dashboards: Power BI dashboards are interactive, so you can drill down into the data to get more detailed insights. You can also share dashboards with others so they can see the same information.
Easy to use: Even for people who are not technical. You can connect to your data, create dashboards, and share them with others without any programming knowledge.
Cost-effective: Because it is a cloud-based BI platform, you only pay for the features you use. This makes it a cost-effective way to get the insights you need to improve your business performance.
While Power BI gives you a holistic view of your business, it also allows you to drill down into specific stats. Financial statements might provide high-level numbers that inform business owners where the entire business is heading, but accurate and effective action – aimed at improvement – requires you to drill down to know if there are issues within a specific segment of your business.
Having relevant information at your disposal will also aid in driving organization-wide behavior change. Once your team has been trained to use Microsoft Power BI, they will be able to assemble, visualize, and scrutinize data from across the company, providing more significant insights into how your business operates and performs. This not only informs high-level decision-making but also equips teams to understand how their day-to-day outputs contribute to the bigger picture.
Concerned about security? Power BI gives you granular control over accessibility, be it external or internal. All data lives centrally/securely in one place in the cloud. This means that while security is tight, there is no need for different versions of reports to be sent continuously via email each time there is an update. With Power BI, your business will benefit from state-of-the-art intelligence capabilities backed by algorithms that are updated regularly.
Navigating Power BI For Your Business
If all this functionality makes the platform sound challenging to navigate then think again. Microsoft Power BI, does not only present its data in a user-friendly manner, it’s practical for users to learn to navigate too. Power BI was built on the foundation of Microsoft Excel. Therefore, if an individual can use Excel, the learning curve is not that steep for Power BI. The difference is that the latter program is more powerful than Excel.
Here’s how NetSuite’s Power BI can be used to improve business performance:
Identify sales trends: Power BI can be used to track sales data over time, identify trends, and forecast future sales. This information can be used to improve marketing campaigns, pricing strategies, and inventory management.
Analyze customer behavior: The software can be used to track customer data, such as purchase history, website activity, and social media engagement. This information can be used to understand customer needs and preferences, and target marketing campaigns more effectively.
Optimize operations: Another task Power BI can be used for is tracking operational data, such as production costs, inventory levels, and shipping times. This information can be used to identify areas where operations can be improved, such as reducing costs or improving efficiency.
Make better financial decisions: Lastly, Power BI can be used to track financial data, such as revenue, expenses, and cash flow. This information can be used to make better financial decisions, such as budgeting, forecasting, and investing.
Get Expert Help Setting up Microsoft Power BI
Power BI provides access to several sources of data including One Note, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, etc. and allows you to track the different types of data – including those from your accounting software – in one place. Even small businesses can use the desktop version of Power BI to make data-driven forecasts, plan budgets, and grow strategically.
Although Power BI has been designed to be easy to use, it can be challenging to integrate with your software. If you want to get the most from the software, it is important to have it set up in a way that takes all your business needs and current software into account. At Fusion CPA, our Microsoft Power BI CPAs can help implement this powerful software for your business to give you the insight needed to adjust your approach to business development and general accounting. We can show you how to integrate Power BI and NetSuite or QuickBooks and help set your business up to improve your chances of achieving financial success.
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This blog article is not intended to be the rendering of legal, accounting, tax advice or other professional services. Articles are based on current or proposed tax rules at the time they are written and older posts are not updated for tax rule changes. We expressly disclaim all liability in regard to actions taken or not taken based on the contents of this blog as well as the use or interpretation of this information. Information provided on this website is not all-inclusive and such information should not be relied upon as being all-inclusive.
