A Power BI Blog for Small Business

Power BI is a powerful business analytics tool developed by Microsoft (in the last decade) that allows you to gather, analyse and visualise data.  It enables users to automate much of the data entry and data cleaning process and create interactive reports.  Whether you would like to track sales performance, monitor inventory levels or understand customer behaviour, Power BI provides you with tools that can either provide insight on a key performance indicator or support management intuition.

While large businesses have been able to invest in data analysis, small business has often lacked the resource to report on key metrics or may be not had the data to analyse.  In recent years the technology used to analyse and report on data has become much more accessible.  There has also been rapid growth in the number of small businesses either processing payments with card readers or selling online – both of these activities generate data that can contain meaningful information that can be extracted.

In my blog, I’ll share examples of techniques that I’ve discovered when attempting to wrangle, model and visualise data found in common data sources.

• Data wrangling: the process of extracting and cleaning data from various sources with the purpose of making it useful for analysis or the automation of processes.
• Data modelling: connecting (or creating relationships between) different data points to enhance insights and reporting, for example linking weather data to sales data.
• Data visualisation/story telling: building reports that are informative, accessible, easily understood and timely.