What do the Gutenberg Press and the rise of robotics in car manufacturing plants in 1980s Japan have in common? Both of these innovations created a centralised, automated, system that allowed the mass production of a product while competitors struggled with making a number of different systems sing off the same hymn sheet.
Centralising information (or what I like to call core centralisation) gives any business that uses them the competitive advantage needed to excel in their industry.
You might wonder what PowerBI and SharePoint have to do with Xero? All is about to be revealed.
Recently Xero has developed in leaps and bounds. It has convinced GTconsult to rollout the software throughout the business for the following key reasons:
- Automatic bank feeds with a few clicks. This ensures that we can get out vital information without the intervention of the human element or expensive custom software;
- Reconciliations now can happen on the fly at any point in time anywhere in the world from any device. Xero checks the bank feed and matches payments with invoices. While this sounds simple, but it makes a number of items easier to do;
- Customer payment reminders can be automatically setup to remind customers about bills on specific dates to ensure prompt payment and thus assisting with cashflow. Once customers have paid this, a reminder will automatically stop as the bank feed will be the notification; and
- While Xero has a number of great graphs setup, the PowerBI integration enables magic; the possibility to embed specific PowerBI reports in SharePoint Online. This is currently only available to SharePoint Online Preview for now, and it is also not possible with SharePoint On-Premise s unless you use the public publish option, which is not a great idea for privacy concerns.
Why is this so awesome? Well, think how you can show account managers outstanding client invoices on a single graph. In this way, they would be able to contact the client and find out what the hold up is.
Further, imagine the possibilities of showing management or exco cashflow prediction, debit and creditors as well as top sales regions and people all within a good look PowerBI report that is automatically updated and presented in SharePoint.
This has been the status quo for big corporates. Smaller companies, with limited resources and cashflow, were traditionally on the ropes in this area. However, with Xero, SharePoint and PowerBI, the playing field is levelled as information is unlocked from finance and displayed to the business that needs that information the most.
Every day at GTconsult, staff members have many email subscriptions to PowerBI reports ranging from Hubspot for Marketing, Xero for Finance and SQL for Staff resourcing and utilisation to ensure they are kept in the know before they start their day. In this way we can: establish sales targets, know where operational efficiencies need to be improved, and which clients need urgent attention.
GTconsult is a cutting-edge consultancy that is technologically driven and provides bespoke productivity solutions that leverage off collaboration software. We live and breathe this not only in our day to day service delivery, but also internally as we manage key aspects such as growth, cash-flow and scalability while ensuring quality controls.