How Business Intelligence Transforms SMBs Drowning in Spreadsheets

Introduction

In today’s world, there’s data everywhere. From buying your morning coffee to searching the internet, data is collected all the time. This information affects things like city planning and sports strategies. But for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), handling and using this data can be tough. 

If big companies struggle with it, how can SMBs manage? The huge amount of data is both good and hard for them.

Discovering Insights:

For small businesses, understanding data is important for making good decisions. But dealing with lots of data using regular spreadsheets can be scary. Finance teams handle requests for profit details, sales teams want to know how products are selling, and IT staff answer questions about measuring data.

The Spreadsheet Puzzle:

Despite being widely used, spreadsheets have their limits. They’re okay for basic analysis but struggle with today’s large amounts of data. Many small businesses use spreadsheets because it’s what they know or they don’t know about other options.

Boosting Small Businesses with Business Intelligence (BI):

The good news is,, there are other tools besides spreadsheets that can change how small businesses deal with data. Business Intelligence (BI) tools offer strong insights and analysis that fit the needs of small businesses.

If you can’t measure data, you can’t manage it

Dealing with storing, navigating, processing, and finding insights from massive amounts of data can be really hard.Think about a busy small business. The few finance staff members are always dealing with tough data requests like:

“I need to understand our profit margins better.”

“I want to know how well a specific product is selling.”

“What should we look at to decide on future investments?”

At the same time, salespeople and managers want to know how customers are using the company’s new digital stuff. If there’s someone handling IT, they’re also getting lots of questions about measuring things. Getting the data to answer these questions is tough for these teams. All they have are regular spreadsheets with some formulas written down.

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Don’t let spreadsheets hold your business back from analyzing data at scale

Even though spreadsheets are good for basic data work, they can’t handle the amount of data smaller teams deal with today. I talk to many leaders of small businesses, and too often they tell me they rely on spreadsheets.

If you’ve ever renovated a house, you might understand how certain beams support the structure. In small businesses, specific spreadsheets do the heavy lifting across different departments.

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Some small businesses stick with spreadsheets for their data because it’s what they’ve always done, they think other options are too hard, or they don’t know about better tools out there. If you’re not a tech expert, it’s hard to know what could make your business run smoother.

But there are other options available that can make gathering and understanding data much easier.

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Don’t let spreadsheets hold your business back! 

Discover how Renova Cloud’s BI & Data solutions can empower your SMB. Contact us today to leverage our special packages designed for SMBs. Don’t miss out our case studies to see how BI has transformed businesses like yours.

Remember, embracing Business Intelligence is the key to unlocking success in today’s data-driven world.