Business Solutions
Petra Solutions is dedicated to helping business owners create custom reporting, business intelligence, and training solutions to maximize QuickBooks so that you can make informed data-driven decisions and interpret the story the numbers are telling you.
Information is the oil of the 21st century, and analytics is the combustion engine.” – Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president, Gartner Research.
The goal is to turn data into information and information into insight.
By having access to the right solutions, you and your team will be able to make proactive decisions instead of reactive decisions.
Empower Your Business with Insightful Data using Business Intelligence Dashboards
The current digital age has transformed the way that things work across the board. But there is perhaps nowhere that it has made more of a difference than in the world of business. We now have tools that allow us to know more about our customers and business than ever before.
Of course, that’s if you know where to find them. The data is out there, as are the tools needed to access it, you just have to learn how to take advantage. In particular, business intelligence is key to an effective modern business strategy.
What Is Business Intelligence
So, what is business intelligence and why should you care about it? The most common business intelligence definition is the strategies and technologies used by companies to analyze data and business information. In more simple terms, it allows businesses to have access to information vital to succeed in multiple areas—whether it’s sales, marketing, finance, or any other division. This business intelligence definition captures the key factor in doing this: technology. The right business intelligence (BI) solutions will empower your organization with more actionable data, providing greater insights and facilitating more strategic decision making.
At Petra Solutions, we use Microsoft’s Power BI platform. It’s the most advanced and leading technology in the business intelligence space. Here’s what Microsoft says about Power BI.
“Power BI is a suite of business analytics tools that deliver insights throughout your organization. Connect to hundreds of data sources, simplify data prep, and drive adhoc analysis. Produce beautiful reports, then publish them for your organization to consume on the web and across mobile devices. Everyone can create personalized dashboards with a unique, 360-degree view of their business. And scale across the enterprise, with governance and security built-in”
Finance
BI tools can help not only track budgets, but give visual insights into financial data, potential problem areas, and overall business health.
Sales/Accounts Receivable
BI can help improve sales performance drastically through visualizing the sales cycle, displaying conversion and churn rates, tracking the pipeline, total revenue, and more.
It can also help you stay on top of accounts receivable with visual graphs showing how much is due and receivable collection performance. This can help with improving cash flow.
Purchasing/Accounts Payable
BI tools can help not only track what is on open purchase orders, but also show what and how much is outstanding on accounts payable.
With this information, you can make informed cash flow decisions and keep a pulse on purchases and upcoming expenses.
Inventory
BI can help improve inventory through visualizing the sales and turnover, displaying average days to sell, inventory turnover, profit marging and more.
Human Resources
HR is empowered with the ability to track employee productivity with performance scores, tools for tracking compensation and payroll, as well as analysis of employee satisfaction.
Customized For Your Business
The advantage of business intelligence is it can be tailored and customized for your business. Do you have specific metrics that you want to track? Power BI can connect to hundreds of data sources to create interactive charts and visualizations to help you make informed data-backed decisions to propel your business forward!
Save Time And Get The Data You Need With Custom Reporting for QuickBooks
There are limitations with customizing reports in QuickBooks and not possible if you are using custom fields.
Secondly, you can’t directly connect with QuickBooks’ data from outside applications.
We solve that problem by using a data warehousing application that allows us to connect to the data in QuickBooks and create custom reports for your specific needs using Crystal Reports.
Training to Help Your Staff Use QuickBooks Properly
Does your staff need training on how to use QuickBooks properly? We can train your staff on how to use the proper workflows inside QuickBooks so that your transactions are recorded correctly and your books are clean!
Certifications
We are certified in QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Desktop, and QuickBooks Enterprise. Our custom reporting and business intelligence solutions only work for QuickBooks Desktop and QuickBooks Enterprise.
About Melvin A Lapp
Consultant
Melvin has been working with accounting and ERP software since 2007 when their family business switched from a paper system to an enterprise ERP software. This conversion and implementation for their family business gave him a lot of experience and insight in all aspects of the business.
Later, Melvin worked for an ERP software company as a consultant tasked with assessing the customer needs, implementations, and training users on using the software. This exposed Melvin to multiple industries and the unique accounting needs of each business. Melvin is also a certified Quickbooks ProAdvisor.
In the past 12 years, Melvin has created hundreds of custom reports and business intelligence metrics.
Melvin’s desire is to help small business owners streamline their accounting processes so they will have a clear picture of their company’s financial health. This clear picture will allow owners to make good decisions that will benefit their companies.