Business Intelligence: How to make your rental business thrive and not just survive

A good accounting or ERP system like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (formerly Dynamics NAV) contains a treasure trove of information. It never deletes data. It may move data around as you enter and post transactions, but it never gets rid of anything. Imagine if that information was at your fingertips when you needed to make both smaller and more important decisions.

So how would a Business Intelligence system benefit your rental business? The answer is that accounting systems were built for three primary tasks – financial reporting, paying your suppliers, and collecting cash from your customers. That’s it. The data is organized around those three tasks. Business Intelligence organizes all the details to manage the unique aspects of your business.

Power BI & Jet Analytics are excellent solutions

In the Microsoft Dynamics world, there are two primary products used for Business Intelligence. The first is Power BI, available through an Office 365 subscription and fully linked to your accounting system. It allows you to design and measure your own key metrics. The reporting database can be refreshed throughout the day to give you real-time or near real-time information. You can combine information from both your accounting system and other sources, such as third party CRM or service systems. Dashboards reflect the unique priorities of each user.

The second option is Jet Analytics, formerly Jet Enterprise, from Jet Global. This solution takes a slightly different approach to arrive at a similar endpoint. Predefined data cubes take data from your accounting and other systems and organizes them into a data relationship structure unique to your organization. Dashboards can then easily be created through either Excel or Power BI to again reflect the unique requirements of each user.

In both cases you can turn data into something much more useful with visual dashboards and reports to quickly identify trends, identify unexpected change, and address problems as quickly as possible. Dashboards are available on your computer, the web, or mobile devices.

While you can implement more complex variations of both products, each of them are designed for rapid implementation with the capability of being configured to fit unique industries and requirements.

As a rental company, imagine if you had real-time access to equipment utilization or equipment availability by class or location? There are virtually no limits. Would you be interested in knowing the long-term ROI of your equipment, or how profitable each of your customers are, or which salespeople are most effective? You would be limited only by your imagination.

To discover how these products could benefit your rental business even further, please contact us today.

Did you miss our recent blog about why you shouldn’t limit your startup rental business with an entry level accounting system?Discover the better alternative.