The owner arrives early in the morning and asks the accountant for last month’s sales figures. The accountant opens Excel, combines a few tables, types something up, and prints it out. This takes half an hour, sometimes a full hour. By the time the numbers land on the owner’s desk, the moment for action has often passed. In many small and medium-sized businesses across Turkey, this is exactly how decisions get made. Monthly reports are prepared, but by the time they are ready, the window the manager needed them for has already closed.
The type of software developed to address this problem is called BI, short for ‘Business Intelligence.’ A BI program pulls data from the company’s accounting, inventory, and sales software, brings it together in one place, and gives the manager a ready answer to the question they are asking. Think of it like a well-organised library: the books are already sorted on the shelves, and you simply say which one you want. The accountant no longer needs to prepare something from scratch every time.
In terms of how it works: data is pulled from the company’s existing programs at set intervals and loaded into a separate database. In technical terms this is called a ‘data warehouse.’ The manager opens a screen on their computer, selects one of the pre-built query templates, and sees the result within a few seconds. Questions like ‘which product sold the most this month?’, ‘which customer owes the most?’, and ‘where did expenses increase compared to last month?’ all have templates prepared in advance. The manager no longer needs to ask the accountant for something every single time.
The most immediate benefit of this model is the time it saves. In a company running on monthly report cycles, a manager can sometimes wait days or even weeks to get a critical piece of information. With BI software, that wait drops to a few minutes. In a textile company, the production manager no longer needs to call the warehouse supervisor to find out which fabric has dropped to a critical stock level — they just look at their screen. The data is in front of them at the moment the decision needs to be made. This may seem like a small change, but in practice it matters enormously: having the right information at the right time prevents wrong decisions and late decisions.
The second key benefit is access control. Not every manager should see every piece of data. The sales manager sees sales figures but not payroll. The finance director has access to all financial data but does not need to dig into production planning details. In BI software, these access levels are defined in advance. Who can see what is set up within the system itself. This keeps information secure and helps each manager focus on the data relevant to their own area. The owner can see everything; department heads see only their own sections.
The third benefit is comparative analysis. A single month’s figure on its own says very little. But when you put that figure next to the same month last year, or next to the budget, the picture becomes clear. BI software does these comparisons automatically. When a manager asks ‘why did expenses go up this month?’, the software shows both the current month’s figure and the same period from the previous year on the same screen. The accountant no longer needs to open two separate tables and compare them by hand.
That said, setting up this kind of software is not straightforward. First, data needs to be pulled from the company’s existing programs. If the accounting program, the inventory program, and the sales program all run on different data structures, bringing that data together requires technical knowledge. In most cases a consultant or a software vendor handles the installation. On top of that, the pre-built templates need to be adapted to the specific company. Every sector asks different questions. A food wholesaler’s needs are not the same as a machinery manufacturer’s. This customisation process takes time and can add to the cost. Until the setup is complete, management keeps working the old way.
A small business owner thinking about investing in this type of software should ask one honest question: how many times a month do I ask ‘where is that number?’ and have to wait for an answer? If this happens several times a week and each wait runs longer than half an hour, the cost of BI software pays itself back quickly. But before anything else, it is worth checking whether the current accounting and inventory programs are producing clean, consistent data. BI software does not tidy up existing data — it only displays what is already there, in an organised way. If the underlying data is messy, the screen will show a messy picture. The right order is always: clean data first, analysis tool second.
This article was originally written in Turkish by Gökhan MERCANOĞLU on June 28, 2004 and has been automatically translated into English and other languages using machine translation.