The Power of Data Visualization Technology

Microsoft's Power BI is one of the most powerful business intelligence tools out there, allowing you to pull vast amounts of information from a wide variety of sources, and turn it into advanced data visualizations. Accelo’s Power BI integration works to take advantage of that powerful visualization technology; pulling your Accelo account’s full range of data on upcoming and ongoing work into that beautiful BI system.

By combining Accelo's Service Operations Automation technology with a business analytics tool like Power BI, the most successful teams can finally go from data to insights in minutes; see any data, in any way, anywhere; and more importantly, get the insights they need for growth on one dashboard...

It's business intelligence like never before, and it's worth its weight in gold as a powerful source of truth.

For example, the visualization below (created with Accelo/Power BI) communicates the total amount of issues or tickets a user has arising, in real-time, across multiple locations in the United States and Canada. From this one dashboard, they can successfully monitor, manage, and respond to pertinent client issues before they become a real problem; one that could hurt their bottom line.

Undoubtedly, this visualization speaks for itself; it's modern, powerful and insightful, and the best part is, it's fairly simple to create...

The Set Up

In Accelo, any trial or paying user with an Office 365 account can access a free or paid version of Power BI. First, you'll need to add the Accelo app to your Power BI account to begin using your Accelo account as a data source. Once added, Power BI will automatically download your entire Accelo account’s history: activities, projects, sales, time entries, and more. Use this dataset to create dashboards and reports - to see how your billable revenue is trending, how much time needs to be invoiced for, or see the status of certain tickets, etc. There are so many insights to be uncovered! For more details, please contact [email protected] or check out this Help Guide.

The Perks

Once set up, you'll be able to kill off a number of spreadsheets and tools, to dramatically decrease the time and money it takes to create complex reports. This integration will be especially useful for business owners who have multiple teams in various time zones. Why? Because you won't need to consolidate hundreds of rows of historical data from dozens of spreadsheets or tools just to understand the broader health of your business - Accelo and Power BI will take care of that for you.

The Insights

This powerful combination of cloud software gives professionals the insights they need to make decisions with confidence, and particularly gives business owners the data they need to identify critical gaps in sales workflows; the gap between target revenue and booked revenue, which is the difference between profitability and loss for many businesses today.

Through Accelo's integration with Power BI, you're able to understand this gap quite easily. For example, build a bar graph like the one below which shows the total amount of revenue that needs to be booked to hit target benchmarks, month over month, by active salespeople.

Take a moment to let this image really sink in, and try to imagine presenting a dashboard like this to your team or manager rather than a Google slide or bunch of documents? The impression it has is far more lasting, the message is solidified, and the engagement is through the roof! In fact, one of our users said this:

"We had our first meeting yesterday where a Power BI dashboard was used  - a mixture of both our sales opportunities and booked work - and it was very well received. The team was like 'oh, nice, can we get it to do this, and can we get it to do that?' So generally a very positive response and probably the start of a new era."

"While we’re very early on in the journey, we look forward to seeing things like: What opportunities can we bring to close? What amount of revenue are we guaranteed to get? How much work have our consultants signed for? What is the actual revenue from proposals? What are the levels of probability on various sales in the pipeline?"

"We also want to see our forward revenue at levels of confidence for the next 12 months, so really, these dashboards will become our Bible."

With Q3 already underway, there's never been a better time to try Accelo. Start your free trial here and get up and running with our Power BI integration today - because it's about time you had access to the insights you need to make decisions with confidence!