Business Intelligence (BI) Introduction
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George Sutton
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Introduction
Customize your page layout (BI Vision only)
Some basics to get you started with BI
Show the top 25 records (BI Vision only)
Search on dimensions and Multi-select / deselect (BI Vision only)
EXPORT CSV (BI Vision only)
BI Tutorial video
Zooming in on Graphs
Toggle chart legend on or off
Apply and save filters (BI Vision only)
Additional resources:
KPIs and calculations
FAQ
Introduction
What is Business Intelligence (BI) and what does Unleashed have to offer?
Business Intelligence or BI is a module in Unleashed that shows data on your business’ performance. This data are based on your transaction records in Unleashed, namely, Purchases, Inventory, Production, Sales, and Customers. They are aggregated to form key performance indicators or KPIs to show how well the business is doing or areas to improve on.
Why did Unleashed build the BI Module and how can it assist in managing your business?
We listened to customer feedback from a wide variety of customers who were getting value from our reports and enquiries, but there was also a consistent theme where many of you wanted more sophisticated analysis, essentially a business intelligence feature, evolving Unleashed from a system of record to a system of results.
Our strategy is to provide you with a free version of BI called BI Foundation which will provide you with some key KPIs and measures for all 5 context areas, more date selections than the current dashboard, time series charts with period comparisons where applicable, and the ability to zoom in on graphs.
Together with our free BI offering, we also developed a pay-to-use feature called BI Vision which includes more KPIs and also provides users with the ability to select measures, drill through to specific results, and cross-filtering per dimension to really mine your data. With Vision, we also provide you with the option to select your own date range which complements the easy date filter buttons (Month to date; Quarter to date; Year to date; Last month, Last quarter, and Last Month).
Remember, what you can measure you can manage.
How does BI get its data?
The BI Module automatically takes a snapshot of your Unleashed records and performs calculations to generate summary KPI values. This happens on a regular basis (The timestamp at the top of the BI pages will show when last it was refreshed) and it saves you valuable time as there is no need to export data and import it into 3rd party software.
To ensure your KPIs stay relevant, this 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. This updates 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.
BI on Trial accounts
All trial accounts of Unleashed will point BI to one shared reporting database to allow trialists to experience BI without the need to load lots of data and transactions first. Data captured on trial accounts will therefore not synchronise to the BI reporting database.
BI on Sandbox accounts
To keep things simple, BI will not be available for Unleashed Sandbox accounts.
Warm data
We aim to refresh all values and graphs regularly, directly from your Unleashed database, no need to refresh or reload data, and the values are displayed in your organization’s base currency.
We display a date-time stamp at the top of each BI page to indicate the last transaction in Unleashed related to values displayed on the selected BI page, also when the latest data refresh occurred. 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 hour for BI Vision subscribers and every 4 hours for Foundation users compared to Purchases, Production, Sales, and Customer which is every hour.
For example, the new Dashboard will display the last transaction across all contexts plus the duration since the last refresh.
Sales; the latest Sales Invoice date:
Customers; the last Customer change.
Inventory, the last stock transaction.
Purchases, the last Purchase Order change.
Permissions
Under the Role Permissions section of Unleashed, you have the ability to set permissions per user role to only allow specific users to access and view these BI pages.
Setting up role permission as indicated above, for the Sales role, will indicate to the user on the main dashboard that there is more context but they do not have permission. These contexts, which these users do not have permission to, are hidden when they look at the side menu under Business Intelligence.