Power BI for small business

by | Oct 7, 2021 | Business, Microsoft

What is Power BI?

Simply put, Power BI is a way to turn data into decisions.

Power BI is a tool that allows you to better understand your data and answer questions that you may have about it.

If Excel is no longer meeting your needs…

If Excel is no longer meeting your needs, this is the Microsoft tool you should be using instead. Power BI takes your data, massages it, and then transforms the information by making visual representations for you in the form of charts, graphs, tables et cetera.

powerBI website

Power BI is flexible. You can utilize data from many sources, for example, a CRM system like Salesforce. Also, use it with your teams or your organization’s Active Directory, third-party software like Google Analytics or GitHub. If you have a database from Oracle or a similar product, you may retrieve its data from those systems. Anything that is heavily data-oriented is going to have some sort of integration with Power BI.

Go with the free version or powerup with a license

The desktop version of Power BI is free. You may download it from the Microsoft website (or the store to get automatic updates). This version has some limitations, as it can only be used locally. Therefore, you cannot easily share dashboards with others. This license is best for organizations that have one person that needs to analyze some data themselves.

The next levels are Power BI Pro and Power BI Premium which are priced per user, per month. For a Power BI Pro license, you will have to invest in a license for each person who is going to share and or collaborate the dashboards. For example, if you have three employees working in your finance department and they need access while two managers will need to access the dashboards, you will invest in a total of five licenses.

With Pro licensing, you will have access to the Power BI functions on a mobile phone allowing you to pull up a dashboard and look at data in real-time remotely.

Additionally, users receive automatic refreshing capabilities from the data sources. Also, if the data sources change, you may click the refresh button a specific number of times per day (automatically) without having to push the button yourself.

There is a limitation of one gigabyte of data that can be processed using Power BI Pro for sharing purposes. The Power BI Pro is ideal for smaller data sets.

Power BI Premium per capacity offers the greatest flexibility of data processing. This version is what data-driven organizations with 50-plus professionals like governments, large corporations, and multinationals need to use.

We hope this helps you understand how Power BI is useful for your small to medium-sized business. If you have any questions about your Microsoft 365 journey, please reach out to us.

For more information on licensing visit: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-ca/pricing/