Looking for a Business Intelligence Software Recommendation - No Vendors Please

Mollie,

PowerPivot (watch the typo in the URL provided above) may do the trick, but it may not be needed or possible. It is a slick tool when it's called for, and when you have the right teacher it doesn't take more than 15 minutes to learn.

Normally I recommend tweaking the accounting system to be able to produce a dashboard. In this case it may make sense to export to Excel, update from your last data dump, and have a tool standing at the ready which automatically produces the KPIs and trends that you need.

Before I recommend Excel tools and techniques, I'd want to know more about the structure of your data, your KPIs, and how you like to view those KPIs. PowerPivot may be what you need, but its availability depends on what version of Excel you're using. You might find useful any combination of PowerPivot, regular PivotTables, formulas, graphs, sparklines, and formulas.

Let's talk, CPA to CPA.

Regards,
Jaime

Jaime Campbell, CPA, CGMA, MBA
Chief Financial Officer | Tier One Services, LLC
"Entrepreneurship Evolved"
[email protected]