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How are the values and charts calculated in Business Intelligence (BI)?

Why do I get a "Restricted Page" error when I open Business Intelligence?

Why is BI showing different values than my Unleashed reports?

Compare KPI with the previous period using BI

How the KPI's in Business Intelligence can improve your business performance

How are the values and charts calculated in Business Intelligence (BI)?

The values and charts generated in BI are calculated using the data from your transactions and records in Unleashed, in your account's base currency. BI will periodically collate your Purchases, Inventory movements, Production Assemblies, Sales, and Customer data in Unleashed to generate the most up to date and accurate KPI's possible. 

There is an automated process (ETL) that extracts all transactions from your Unleashed database every hour to populate the values. Different formulas are applied per tile and results are reflected on the KPIs and charts on BI pages. For a breakdown of all the calculations used to populate the values and figures shown in BI's pages, see BI KPIs with tooltips and calculations.

Why do I get a "Restricted Page" error when I open Business Intelligence?

If your User Role's permissions are limited to restrict access to the pages of Business Intelligence (BI), you will not be able to view or use them. You'll see a "Restricted Page" message when selecting the context page or tab in BI or you won't see the context page listed in the main menu, under BI. 

To gain access to restricted BI pages you must contact either your Account Owner or a Superuser and request they update your role permissions, enabling access to the Business Intelligence's BI Foundation and BI Vision options. 

To update a role's permissions to enable access to BI:

1. As a Superuser or Account Owner, from Unleashed's main menu go to Settings, Security and select Role Permissions.
2. Use the Role dropdown menu to select the role being updated. 
3. Open the Business Intelligence section.
4. To allow access to BI Foundation's pages, select BI Foundation and click the padlock icon to enable access for the appropriate context pages:
   • Customers
   • Inventory
   • Production
   • Purchases
   • Sales.
5. To allow access to BI Vision's pages, select BI Vison and click the padlock icon to enable access for the appropriate context pages:
   • Customers
   • Inventory
   • Production
   • Purchases
   • Sales
     • BI Historical Data Import - Sales
     • Targets
   • Targets and Tracking
     • Notifications
     • Targets
6. Once enabled, the user with the updated role must log out, clear their browser's cache and cookies and access to BI's page will be enabled when they next log in.

Why is BI showing different values than my Unleashed reports?

Unleashed's standard reports, found in the main menu under Reports, update in real-time as transactions are updated and completed in Unleashed to give you a precise view of your account's data. However, as BI is performing calculations based on the same updates and changes, which takes a little more time, BI's data may appear slightly out of sync with standard reports. 

The BI module takes regular, periodic snapshots of your data and processes it to calculates the KPI's, summaries and charts in the BI Foundation and Vision tabs. This means that new transactions that haven been processed since the last snapshot will only be included when the next snapshot of data is taken. We aim to refresh all values and graphs every hour, directly from your Unleashed database, so there's no need to manually refresh or reload data.

A date-time stamp is displayed at the top of each BI page to indicate the last transaction included on the values displayed, and the time of the last data refresh. The "Last transaction date and time" is per context page, therefore could be different as the scheduled refresh for the BI Inventory page is every 4 hours for none-BI Vision subscribers, and hourly for BI Vision subscribers. The other context pages: Purchases, Production, Sales, and Customers, aim to refresh every hour.

Compare KPI with the previous period using BI

With BI you're able to compare KPI's from a selected date range and compare the results with the previous period of the same range, helping to provide you with a clearer understanding of how your business is performing.

Taking Sales Revenue as an example, to compare your a period's revenue with the previous period:

1. From Unleashed's main menu, go to Business Intelligence and select Sales.
2. In either the Foundation or Vision tab, depending on your subscription's access, go to the date range selector in the top right corner. 
3. Use the date range selector to select a period, e.g. Quarter to date. 
4. In the KPI widgets displayed on the Foundation and Vision tabs, the current Quarter to date e.g. Q1 2025 values will be shown in orange, overlayed with the previous quarter's results e.g. Q4 2024 in blue. 

How the KPI's in Business Intelligence can improve your business performance 

In the following section we've provided some further insights, per context, on how you can use the data shown in BI to review and improve your business's performance.

Purchases

• Shows how many Purchase Orders we created for the period selected: Look into consolidating Purchases Orders per Supplier, which can streamline stock receipting and potentially reduce costs. 
• The value of Purchase Orders in an Open status for a given period: Follow up with the Suppliers to review their lead times, which can help you plan effectively for your fulfillment needs.

Inventory

• Shows the total current stock value on open Purchase Orders, categorized by Product Group, Product Type and Product: Review with your Suppliers to identify if there's a wider supply issue for specific products or product groups.  
• Displays, on average, how many days it would take to sell all current Stock On Hand (SOH): Consider how costly it is hold stock that takes longer to sell, and is there a more efficient and cost effective way to manage it. 
• Shows the total value of Stock Adjustments completed, per Warehouse: Identify if any warehouses appear to be processing more or less adjustments than the rest and consider if there's any process or stock discrepancies that could be causing the differences and need investigating.
• How the total stock on hand value changed over the last 12 months: Consider any fluctuations and monitor your inventory's turnover. This can help to understand if you're holding on to more stock than you need or if the cost of your goods is increasing over time. 
• Which products are "old" stock: Prioritise selling stock that's been on hand for a longer period of time, and streamline your cashflow. 

Production

• The value and quantity of assembled stock for a given period: Review how efficient the production process was, and whether the assemblies were completed on time. Consider if there's a more efficient production process that will save on time and costs. 
• Which Assembled Products had the biggest wastage for the period selected: Consider which assembled products are costing the most wastage, and if there's a opportunity to improve it or create a By-Product with the wastage instead. 
• Which components were used for assemblies the most during a given period: Refer to your Suppliers to review your component prices, consider bulk quantity pricing to reduce costs.
• Did the average cost per unit increase or decrease per product assembled: Explore why some products are more costly to assemble than others, consider the source and destination warehouses to gauge if there's differences in the production process that could save on costs. 
• The cost of assemblies for the period selected and compare to the previous period: Understand if any changes in process or component stock has had an impact on the cost of your assemblies. 

Sales

• Show the comparison between current and prior periods: Identifies is your business' performance is improving and highlights areas for focus to drive further sales.
• Which products brings in the biggest gross profit %, and the salesperson that sells that product: There may be a reason that sales person's outselling their colleagues, which can be shared and incentivized with your team to further drive sales.
• Shows the average revenue per order by salesperson: Highlight your top sellers and identify those that need improvement.
• Gross profit by product group: Review which Sales Channels perform best per product group, and if it can it be better utilized.
• Use the Transaction type widget to identify how much revenue is impacted by Charges and Credits: Monitor how much revenue is being credited and consider ways to reduce it. Similarly, understand the charge implications for your customers and review whether this is impacting your overall revenue. 
• Add annual Sales targets for Sales Revenue, Gross Profit, and Gross Profit percentage: The Targets and Tracking functions allow you to set and monitor achievements for your business' performance.
• Set up notification rules to give you Top 5 Customers and Top 5 Products based on Sales Revenue: See the highlights in your inbox, at a glance.

Customers

• How many active customers you have, quarter on quarter: This metric helps to understand if your active customer list is growing, and which of your Sales People and Channels have the most active customers. This will also help identify inactive customers for further outreach and consideration.
• The average revenue per customer: Identifies your top customers and those that could improve. Consider implementing short-term strategies to boost poor performing customer sales to improve performance.