IT Glossary
What is Business Intelligence?
The discipline of turning company data — sales, stock, costs — into live reports and dashboards that decisions can stand on.
Picture the Monday meeting where someone asks which products the company loses money on, and the answer takes three days of spreadsheet archaeology across the ERP, the accounting package and a marketing export. Business Intelligence exists to close precisely that gap. Data from every source flows automatically into one place, gets cleaned, and turns into living dashboards — margin per product, sales by rep and region, customers in decline, projected cash flow — refreshed daily with no manual labour. The difference from the reports inside each application is the crossing: BI joins sales from the ERP with marketing spend and bank receipts, and it is in those joins that decision-changing conclusions appear. The tooling has become accessible to smaller firms (Power BI, Metabase and their relatives start cheap or free); the real investment sits in data hygiene and in defining the indicators honestly, because a dashboard computed on inconsistent definitions is fast, pretty and wrong. A pragmatic start beats a grand programme: two or three vital metrics on existing data, extended as trust grows.
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Message us on WhatsApp or send an email — you talk directly to a developer.
office@northdan.com · +40 752 070 247
Why it matters for your business
One truth instead of five spreadsheets
Every department reads the same figures, computed the same way — meetings debate decisions, not whose report version is right.
Early signals, not autopsies
The daily dashboard shows the shrinking margin or the fading customer now — not in the quarterly report, when it is too late.
Reporting hours reclaimed monthly
Reports once assembled by hand over days now generate themselves — people analyse instead of copying cells.
Frequently asked questions
How does BI differ from the reports inside my ERP?
The ERP reports on what it knows; BI joins ERP data with accounting, marketing, bank and spreadsheet sources into one picture. It also adds flexibility: new questions get answered in minutes, not through a change request to the ERP supplier.
What does a BI project cost for a mid-sized company?
The tools start at tens of euros monthly or free (Metabase, Looker Studio); the real cost is implementation — connecting sources, cleaning data, defining indicators — typically a few thousand euros, amortised quickly by the reporting hours it eliminates.
Our data is scattered and messy — can we still do BI?
That is precisely what it exists for: the first step of any project is inventorying and cleaning the sources. The pragmatic rule: do not wait for perfect data — start with two or three vital indicators on what exists and expand; perfection is the direction, not the entry condition.
Let’s talk about your project
Message us on WhatsApp or send an email — you talk directly to a developer.
office@northdan.com · +40 752 070 247