🔑 How Accountants Can Effectively Scale Power BI Analysis | Cameron Lynch

Today I am speaking with Cameron Lynch founder of Etani Business Platform Cameron is a Chartered Accountant and the founder of the Etani Business Platform. He believes he can help businesses survive and prosper in today’s disruptive environment. Cameron is experienced with Business Intelligence (BI), Analytics, Big Data and implementing cloud-based solutions to streamline reporting systems. Live data has a significant role to play in assisting businesses to make wiser decisions, both now and in the future. Cameron’s passion is driven by the concept of creating vehicles to help businesses and individuals prosper. Cameron worked previously in Consolidated Financial Reporting. Every month, a team of accountants would send the subsidiary financial accounting data to existing, pre-filled tabs on numerous Microsoft Excel spreadsheets for consolidation.  While this may sound like smooth sailing, all it would take is for one person to hit the wrong key in the wrong cell, paste data into an incorrect tab, or add an additional column, without updating the SUM formula, and everything was corrupted. It was impossible to retain the integrity of all the accumulated data. Imagine this scenario: You walk into a meeting with your Board of Directors, armed only with your phone, tablet or laptop, containing live consolidated management reports. Your device can continually review all marketing, sales, finance and operational data in one place at any time. You can access updated information and answer all questions raised in the meeting, saving everybody a great deal of time and providing invaluable accurate insights.  Finally, Cameron has created a diverse new system, the culmination of years of experience, searching, testing, learning and an overwhelming passion to be the best.  How does the Etani Business Platform help accountants? When you couple Etani and Microsoft Power BI, you have a powerful system to help accountants in many different ways: 1. Etani provides your SME and small corporate clients with the best analytics software in the world. They have full access to live business insights simply by using their phone, tablet or desktop.  2. Accounting firms are enabled effectively do Power BI analysis at scale 3. You can extract data from third party SaaS software. Xero, MYOB, Quickbooks Online, Workflow Max, SimPro, Dear inventory, and many more. Live data is then streaming straight into your client’s dashboards  4. The Etani Bootcamp gives you 5 x 2 hour training sessions on BI in-house. Unlimited staff can attend or do the training online at your own pace. There’s plenty of on-going training available.  Templates: Etani has created a lengthy list of templates you can use inside Power BI. These cover sales analysis, budgeting, cashflow analysis, and various other scenarios. This template library continues to grow. Instead of your client struggling to make their own templates for each aspect of their work, these have been created for them, saving thousands of hours. Client delivery vehicle: Etani embeds your reports and dashboards into your own branded application. These are available on Desktops, iPhones, iPads, Androids and Tablets for your clients to use.  There are numerous benefits of doing this. • Your clients don’t need a Power BI Pro account (at a cost of $12.70 per month per user) to use the business insights. • You retain control of your IP. • The client can’t take the Power BI work you have done to another accountant. In this episode, we talk about . . .   How his training to be an accountant, and understanding of cash flow has equipped him to run a business How Etani and Microsoft Power BI help practices deliver advisory services to SME’s. The two main reasons, Cameron thinks users love Power BI The different data sources clients want, beyond Financial data The most successful rollouts of Etani Business Platform and Power BI are undertaken by firms charging a monthly fee, productising their offering, and benefitting from recurring revenue. And I have included in the show notes a link to The International Federation of Accountants post stating that the reported balance sheet only reflects 20% of what is happening in the business and a link to those Trello templates. Thank you for listening to Cloud Stories. I hope you enjoyed the show. Can I encourage you to sign up to my newsletter, by visiting https://heathersmithsmallbusiness.com/newsletter/