Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence has taken the principle of reliance accounting one step further, in that it readily combines the management data with non-financial statistics. With the application of technology it can analyse, present and share that data through mediums such as dashboards and other data visualisations. Business Intelligence also enables faster information transfer from source to decision maker, right through to real time reporting.

Let us take a construction company as an example:

Compliance accounting – With this process you would only know if the company had made an overall profit at the end of the year.

Reliance accounting – The completion of monthly Management Accounts would allow regular insight. With the introduction of jobcosting you will know if a job is in the black or red.

Business Intelligence – By viewing daily the dashboard created for the business, summary of profitability by job and supplier drift, you can quickly see the jobs that need a request for payment to be sent or those that you need to attend to control the spending. The dashboard assists you in reacting to changes in the company’s cashflow and profitability much faster than before.

Another example would be share trading:

Compliance accounting – Only at the end of the year do you know if you have made a profit on the shares. So the time to buy or sell has long since passed.

Reliance accounting – Share price data may be received daily, weekly or monthly. An opportunity may still be missed.

Business Intelligence – If the dashboard being viewed gives the share price and is refreshing the data every minute then you will be able to maximise profit or minimise losses. The ability to build a KPI in to the dashboard to either e-mail or text a buy or sell alert at a set price allows you to stop checking; enabling you to carry on with the rest of your day growing your business.