Business Intelligence (BI) Introduction
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George Sutton
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Page contents
Additional resources:
KPIs and calculations
BI Vision Plus - Targets and Tracking
BI Introduction
Business Intelligence (BI) is a reporting module in Unleashed that displays your company's performance in an interactive, easy to review, visual format. Using the records and transactions processed in your Unleashed account, BI collates the data to generate widgets, graphs and charts to form key performance indicators (KPIs), to show how well your business is doing or areas to improve on.
BI is designed to provide a sophisticated analysis of the following five key context areas:
- Purchases
- Inventory
- Production
- Sales
- Customers
Points to note
- BI will display values and KPI's in your Unleashed base currency.
- BI is not be available for Unleashed Sandbox accounts.
- All trial Unleashed accounts will use a shared BI reporting database, pre-loaded with example data and transactions. This allows Unleashed trialists the opportunity to experience BI without the need to load lots of data and transactions first.
BI Foundation vs BI Vision
By default, all Unleashed accounts have BI Foundation included as a part of their subscription, with the option to upgrade to BI Vision, at any time, for a wider range of functionality of the reporting module.
BI Foundation provides you with:
- Basic key KPIs and measures for all five context areas.
- Predefined date range selector options.
- Time series charts with period comparisons where applicable.
- The ability to zoom in on graphs available.
BI Vision provides you with all the same detail as BI Foundation, but also:
- Additional KPIs for each context area.
- Custom date ranges.
- Selectable measures to drill down for specific results.
- Cross-widget filters for each context area.
- Set targets and track your business's progress at regular intervals.
- Set notifications to receive a snapshot BI review via email.
BI's data source
In order to product BI's KPIs, charts and graph's as accurately and often as possible, Unleashed takes regular snapshots of your data and performs constant calculations to refresh BI's data. To ensure your KPIs stay relevant, each snapshot is inspected for record changes e.g. new Sales Orders, updated Customer records, etc. The record changes are then processed and summaries are updated, subsequently updating your KPIs based on the changes detected within that inspection timeframe.
Of course, at the time of inspection and processing, there could be transactions that have happened and are not accounted for in the batch that’s being processed. Not to worry because they will be included in the next inspection, processed, and calculated accordingly.
Tip: The best time to look at BI is early morning before any transactions are processed in Unleashed.
Refresh rates
The time stamp display within each BI context's Foundation or Vision tab indicates when the context's data was last refreshed, also when the latest data refresh occurred. e.g. "Last transaction date and time (Data refreshed time)".
The "Last transaction date and time" is per context page therefore could be differ from the scheduled refresh of data. For instance, the BI Inventory page refreshes every hour for BI Vision subscribers and every 4 hours for Foundation users, whilst both BI Foundation and Vision update every hour for Purchases, Production, Sales, and Customers.
For example, the BI Dashboard will display the last transaction across all contexts plus the duration since the last refresh.
In BI's Sales - Foundation, BI uses "The Last Sales Invoice change".
In BI's Customers - Foundation, BI uses "Last Customer change".
In BI's Inventory - Foundation, BI uses "Last Sock transaction", which includes receipting Purchase Orders, dispatching Shipments, completing Stock Adjustments, Stock Counts, Warehouse Transfers and Assemblies.
In BI's Purchases- Foundation, BI uses "Last Purchase Order change".
Role permissions
In order to access and use BI, either in Foundation or Vision, the user's role must have the appropriate BI permissions enabled. The role permissions available for BI are:
- BI Foundation: Customers
- BI Foundation: Inventory
- BI Foundation: Production
- BI Foundation: Purchases
- BI Foundation: Sales
- BI Vision: Customers
- BI Vision: Inventory
- BI Vision: Production
- BI Vision: Purchases
- BI Vision: Sales
- BI Historical Data Import
- Targets, with Can Edit option.
- BI Vision: Targets and Tracking
- Notifications
- Targets
If a user's role restricts a context area from either the BI Foundation or BI Vision permission, the context area will not be shown or available to view in Unleashed's main menu, under Business Intelligence.
To update a user's BI role permissions, either the