Digitization with Microsoft 365
From AI strategy to daily use: Sport-Thieme shows how Microsoft 365 Copilot became a productive companion in everyday work with a clear approach, strong change management and practical use cases.
Success story: Foundation intact
Introduction to Power BI with bexio: Keep an overview of your business
The Intact Foundation needed an effective method to evaluate and clearly visualize the performance of its various business units. Therefore, they opted for a Power BI solution to extract the best insights from their data. With Microsoft Power BI, the foundation can now conduct more efficient and, above all, more regular analyses of its business activities.
customer
In 1997, the intact foundation was established as a "simple" unemployment project with a secure bicycle parking facility. Since then, its services and programs have developed significantly. Today, intact offers long-term unemployed individuals a wide range of employment opportunities in various sectors. Its goal is to provide the long-term unemployed with meaningful employment, the opportunity to build a social network, and support for their professional integration.
Initial situation
Why Microsoft Power BI?
The intact foundation offers a variety of services that are assigned to different business areas. It is therefore important for the foundation to have an overview of the performance of the individual areas. However, no division into areas is possible in bexio (business software). In order to track the success of the business areas and report it to the board of directors, the data must be exported from bexio and the list and distribution of overhead costs among the areas must be created manually. This process involves considerable effort for the foundation and was therefore only carried out every six months.
In order to be able to carry out more efficient and regular evaluations in the future, the intact foundation has decided on a Power BI solution.
What were the requirements for the solution?
The new solution is intended to enable the foundation to carry out a timely and rapid evaluation, including the distribution of overhead costs across all areas. The comparison to the previous year, the budget analysis and the analysis of customers and products are also among the requirements for the Power BI solution. The evaluations should be available at any time via dashboards. An authorization concept gives the board of directors, management and department management individual access to the reports. With the help of well-chosen visualizations in Power BI, facts such as liquidity development, the utilization of the areas and the pursuit of goals should be clearly presented. Using integrated drills and tooltips, the foundation should be able to access further helpful information intact.
Another requirement of the intact foundation is that independent evaluations and dashboards are possible. This enables the people involved to analyze the data and information relevant to them and gain important insights.
Also important for the foundation was the integration of the previous year's data and the budget. Since the business software bexio was only introduced at intact last year, the previous year's data is missing. These should be integrated into Power BI together with the budget so that comparisons are possible.
The right Power BI solution
Integration of previous year's data and budget into Power BI
At the beginning, redIT dealt with the integration of the previous year's data and the budget in order to enable future comparison. For this purpose, the previous year's figures were saved on SharePoint and integrated into Power BI. In addition, the data was assigned to the respective areas to enable a detailed development evaluation. At the same time, the budget could be integrated into the system in a similar way.
Assignment of accounts to business areas
The different accounts can be assigned to the business areas using Power BI. To do this, distribution rates can be entered in Excel for a whole year or on a monthly basis. Based on this, Power BI creates a distribution key (1: chart of accounts key), which enables the automatic allocation of income and expenses according to the set percentage, as well as a table with the business areas (2: cost centers) for further evaluations and the allocation of overhead costs.
Distribution of overhead costs across business areas
In a second step, the overhead costs are distributed among the business areas in Power BI in order to obtain an overview of the respective areas. This distribution can also be controlled using fixed or variable distribution rates in Excel. After the overhead costs have been distributed, the authorized persons can view regular evaluations and the current income statements for each area.
Clear dashboard for independent setup
Based on the known requirements, redIT has already created an initial dashboard for management and department management. In addition, the intact foundation received an introduction to Power BI and its data model, which means that employees are now able to design or adapt dashboards independently.
Appropriate authorization concept with a lot of security
The intact foundation required restricting the permissions of department heads in Power BI to enable automatic pre-filtering of data for each individual. To achieve this, roles were defined that restrict access for logged-in users ( more on this in this blog ).
Conclusion
The intact Foundation's decision to implement Power BI as a solution for data analysis and evaluation is an important step towards optimizing its business processes. By incorporating various requirements, such as timely evaluation of business areas, comparison with previous year's data and budgets, and the ability to independently create evaluations, Power BI is established as a powerful tool. This enables the foundation to make informed decisions and manage its services transparently and efficiently. The introduction of Power BI enables the intact foundation to better manage its business activities, identify opportunities and effectively pursue strategic goals.
If you also use the business software bexio and want to link it with Power BI, you can find our offer here .
«Corina Camenzind from redIT Services AG accompanies us with expert knowledge, patience and humor in the fascinating possibilities of Power BI. Thanks to the financial cockpit with integrated business accounting, we have an overview and save time through automated processes.”
Olivier Eicher
Head of Central Services, Intact Foundation
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