This week’s post is written by Kurt Steckel, CEO of InetSoft Partner Bison Analytics. Bison’s state of the art Business Intelligence solution integrates seamlessly with Quickbooks, enabling growing organizations to stay on Quickbooks while managing their expanding reporting and informational needs.
Do you ever get the impression that you’re missing the boat?
Fast, Insightful Quickbooks Dashboards
If your business is like most other growing organizations, you’ve been hearing about the promise of business intelligence and data analytics for years. But until recently, the competitive advantage of sophisticated business intelligence was the exclusive domain of deep-pocketed enterprises. Meanwhile, you’ve been left on the shore, with simple, cookie-cutter reports and dashboards as your dinghy and paddle, if you’ll pardon the analogy.
Now all of that has changed. There are a range of BI tools targeting small and medium sized businesses (SMBs). These cost-conscious solutions provide a competitive advantage for emerging companies to grow their business just like the big guys have been doing for years.
One such player is the Bison System, a proprietary Intuit-approved business intelligence tool for QuickBooks. The Bison System was born from a powerful partnership of InetSoft’s Style Intelligence and the team at Bison Analytics, who deliver customized planning and analytics to countless growing companies using QuickBooks.
We’ve spoken with hundreds of CFOs running on QuickBooks. Some of the most common issues they tell us about are the challenges of managing their data in spreadsheets and the complexities of consolidating their data. Others tell us about the hassles of ‘slicing and dicing’ their data.
We have found that CFOs using QuickBooks’ native tools alone have difficulty in manipulating their data and in delivering timely, reliable reports. Frequently they must create one set of reports for management and a different set of reports for their teams. They encounter numerous hurdles to perform this important function routinely, not the least of which is having to dump large amounts of data into Excel and then merge it all with as few errors as possible. That’s not an easy task.
With the Bison System, InetSoft and Bison Analytics provide emerging businesses running on QuickBooks the only 100% complete, end-to-end business intelligence and consolidation environment for QuickBooks. It enables businesses to get more strategic control of their companies through insightful analysis of their data. They get the data they need, and view it the way they want to see it, not limited by canned, off-the-shelf reports or dashboards.
QuickBooks + The Bison System = Powerful ERP for Emerging Businesses
View the data you want to see, the way you want to see it
We are amazed at the many ways CFOs and controllers of these organizations are using the the Bison System. What they all have found is that QuickBooks + The Bison System = Powerful ERP for Emerging Businesses.
Let’s take a look at the impact this has had on several organizations.
- A New Hampshire-based fitness center with 7 locations – and 14 QuickBooks files – uses Bison to, 1. Consolidate all their QuickBooks files; 2. Report their customized financial results to senior management; 3. Provide their line managers with their customized individual reports routinely. One report alone saves them over 10 hours a month that they use to gain deeper insights into their business.
- A Las Vegas-based restaurant group with 24 restaurants across Nevada and Arizona uses Bison to consolidate their 27 QuickBooks files, and provide them with the customized reporting and detailed budgeting they could not get exclusively from their QuickBooks accounting system. One custom budgeting report that was a last-minute emergency request was delivered in just 4 hours. That report is now used monthly by the executive team.
- A large digital marketing agency in Florida uses Bison to consolidate their 10 QuickBooks files and provide deep analytics for their senior management as well as their department managers. Bison solves the CFO’s biggest fear – not having good, reliable information – by providing the tools so he has access to crucial information that otherwise would be very difficult and time-consuming to organize and report on.
These are by no means the outliers. The list of companies using highly customized reporting and deep drill down, built to their specifications, goes on across a wide array of industries. That includes an educational services company in Pennsylvania, an IT services firm in the Washington, DC area, a manufacturing company in Georgia, and a construction design company in Texas, to name just a few. This is made possible by the powerful combination of InetSoft’s Style Intelligence and Bison’s unique BI software for SMB’s.
BI Solutions for Growing Businesses
Scalable automation reduces errors and saves time
An interesting side note here is that all of these companies are experiencing healthy growth. Each has a different set of requirements, including P&L, budgeting, productivity, performance, comparatives, consolidations, and deep drill down. And all include highly customized reporting. This demonstrates that the InetSoft-Bison combination can successfully address a wide array of challenges across many different business model types.
The strategic value of the InetSoft Bison combination is significant. As one of our customers said recently, “Bison Systems’ approach to QuickBooks as a database, rather than as a software, has unlocked QuickBooks in a way that I never expected”. And he continues, “The more I remind myself that it’s just data, the more I just say, ‘We’ll let Bison manipulate the data for us and then we’ll move upward from there.’”
Put simply, BI is really about managing data for your strategic advantage.
And now growing businesses running on QuickBooks have a powerful tool that gives them the BI advantage they need to compete in a data-driven world. Small businesses no longer need miss the boat.
To learn more about Bison Analytics scalable Quickbooks solution, visit www.bisonanalytics.com.
