?? Break free from spreadsheet chaos with AI and simplify your next Board meeting.

It’s Friday afternoon, and your boss has just sent you an email with a spreadsheet attached. The task? Incorporate a fresh, competitive benchmarking report—packed with market data on pricing trends and consumer demand forecasts—into the deck for Monday morning’s board meeting.

The agenda for the meeting includes the usual last quarter’s performance review: production, sales, and financial KPIs, followed by a discussion of next quarter’s forecast. The pressure is on, and the data needs to be flawless.

As the go-to analyst, you have a well-established process. Your database connects departmental tables, and you have built data transformation rules to consolidate information from sales, marketing, production, and finance. In theory, refreshing the latest data should prepare your dashboards for the task.

Piece of cake, right? Not this time!

The third-party agency’s benchmarking report doesn’t align neatly with your company’s internal master data. Sales uses product codes, production relies on SKUs, marketing has its own naming conventions, and now you’re faced with reconciling all of that with the agency’s format.

Your weekend vanishes in a blur of tedious work:

• Manually stitching together spreadsheets.
• Writing endless VLOOKUPs to align product codes and SKUs.
• Cleaning mismatched data formats and filling in gaps.
• Cross-referencing numbers to ensure consistency across departments.

By Sunday evening, you’ve cobbled together a dense report that doesn’t feel fully accurate, and you’re drained. Worse yet, you know this Frankenstein isn’t sustainable.

Sound familiar?

? This is where modern AI-powered tools like Bricks step in to save the day.

Instead of spending hours (or days) wrestling with data, Bricks automates the heavy lifting. During my recent trial of Bricks, I discovered how it can make your life easier:

1. Bricks identifies inconsistencies in master data—like mismatched product codes and SKUs—and resolves them in minutes. No more guesswork or manual mapping.
2. Import datasets from multiple departments or external sources directly into Bricks’ Grid without manual copying or pasting.
3. Enables finance, sales, and marketing teams to work in the same environment, flagging issues and making updates in real time.
4. With Bricks’ Board feature, visual reports and presentations are always up to date. Adjust one number, and every chart or table refreshes instantly.
5. Bricks doesn’t just crunch numbers; it highlights anomalies, trends, and actionable insights, allowing you to deliver real value instead of just data.

?? Real-Life impact

For food and beverage or CPG small and medium companies, this isn’t just another productivity tool, it’s a competitive advantage that lets you walk into Monday’s meeting with a clean, consolidated dataset that everyone trusts, provides real-time dashboards showing trends in production efficiency, sales growth, and market positioning, and generates insights that help adjust production schedules based on the latest demand forecast.

Instead of scrambling over spreadsheets all weekend, you’re leading the conversation with confidence and clarity, and all through natural plain language interactions between you and the tool: no more complex formulas and transformations.

?? Licensing options

Bricks offers three tiers:

• The free plan is ideal for individuals or small teams. It comes with unlimited grids and boards, up to five collaborators, and 50 AI credits per day.
• The Plus Plan, at $9 per user per month, supporting up to twenty collaborators, and 100 AI credits per day.
• Enterprise plan for larger organizations, with unlimited collaborators, unlimited AI credits, and 24/7 support.

?? Other comparable products

Bricks is part of a growing market of AI-powered spreadsheet and other office productivity tools:

• Numerous.ai: Enhances spreadsheets with AI capabilities like SEO content generation, product classification, and sentiment analysis.
• SheetAI: Works within Google Sheets to clean data, generate text, and predict values, saving time and reducing errors.
• PromptLoop: Automates data tasks and real-time analysis in Google Sheets and Excel, offering custom workflows.

Each brings unique strengths to the table (no pun intended!), but for me Bricks stands out for its integrated approach to data transformation, reporting, and collaboration.

?? Join the Conversation

Are you tired of battling messy spreadsheets? Tools like Bricks are transforming how we work, shifting the focus from tedious tasks to generating insights and driving value.

Let me know in the comments what productivity challenges you face, and if you’ve tried AI-powered tools like Bricks. I’d love to hear your thoughts on how these tools can fit into your workflow and what real life use cases could benefit from them.

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