The Power of Business Intelligence

Big companies spend big dollars on data lakes and drag and drop business intelligence analytics solutions and that’s ok for those with deep pockets. But what if you want the power of drag and drop analytics on an SME budget?

The answer is Centegra Plus Business Intelligence and Analytics (BI).

What is Business Intelligence?

All systems, Centegra Plus included, will provide you with a range of useful reporting within a cloud App. These are very important features with powerful reporting that is automated, accessible and can be outputted in CSV and opened in Excel. However, all these reports are fixed formats and despite us also having a customised reporting option that our clients find very valuable, these are still reports with filters which have to be set, with limited interactive features. If you really want to analyse the data, put drag, and drop values into pivot tables and compare groups of products or stores over different periods, giving an instantaneous response to your thoughts. If you need to add your own filters, and to group and order the data, then you need BI and an analytical data set.

What's in the Centegra Plus BI?

Our Analytical Data includes all your transactional, sales and payments data from the start of day one. It also features key metrics like customer count and average spend, plus a lot more.

The core data includes:

• Net Sales
• Gross Sales
• Tax
• Discounts and Recommended Retail Pricing
• Quantities
• Average Spend
• Customer Count

The data can then be sliced and diced to your heart’s content by combining as many different dimensions as you wish from a list such as:

• Sites, Locations and Site Groups
• Products, Groups, and higher-level groups up to 4 levels of grouping
• Clerks and Clerk Groups
• Discounts and Discount Groups
• Payments and Payment Type Groups
• Source, where the sales occurred – POS, Online, Kiosk, Click and Collect with grouping.
• Price levels
• Transaction Types: Sales, Refunds, No of sales and more.
• Time - this can be provided in calendar format or to your own fiscal calendar to allow comparisons on like for like periods, using ISO standards for 4-4-5, day of the week analysis and hour by hour analysis.

Why is Centegra Plus BI so cost effective?

All the data on the Centegra Plus Platform is automatically consolidated into an analytical data format that allows you to publish this data in a highly efficient manner. We utilise Microsoft Excel as the tool to view this analytical data and most customers already have access to Microsoft Excel which means there are no additional costs incurred in licenses for analytical tools. The result is a very low per store, per month fee.

How do I use the BI?

Once configured, which takes a few working days, you will be given an introductory training session which includes a unique set of secure credentials to connect Microsoft Excel to the Analytical Data. Then it's a simple process of opening a spreadsheet, adding a pivot table, and then cracking on with the analytics you want to investigate. Dragging data into the pivot tales refreshes the data in seconds, allowing you to play and investigate the data in real time, with no waiting for data to run. All the Microsoft features are available – you can save and re-open, copy and edit, colour code and add KPIs. Graph the data, pie charts and the lot, the world is your oyster, then you can share with other members of your team. You can even embed figures in power point and other Microsoft tools. Refresh the data at any time to bring in up to date data. Since the data is not held in the spreadsheet, but held in the cloud, you can share it with others who have different security levels and filter the data to the levels you choose.?

Talk to us today to find out more?about the power of BI.

The future is Enterprise Centric. The future is Centegra Plus.