We have three tools that have been helping our clients in the last six months, I certainly don’t want to keep them to myself.
Two are reporting tools and one is an online database
- Qliksense
- PowerBI
- Quickbase
Qliksense
I happened upon this tool while looking for alternatives to Tableau. It is a business intelligence tool which can handle really large sets of data as if it is nothing! It produces some really cool visualizations and it takes just two hours to set up your first set of reports. Now here is the really cool part, it is FREE for use on a desktop machine, Qliksense Desktop or when using it on the cloud, QlikCloud. So far we have linked it to Sage 50 (Peachtree), AccountEdge (MYOB) and SQL databases. Here is a video to get a taste.
http://www.qlik.com/us/products/qlik-sense/desktop
Power BI
This is Microsoft’s offering into the Business Intelligence World. It is not as stable as other business intelligence tools but we started using it since it is connected to Microsoft Project Online and produces a group of reports for Project Online automatically. If you are using other Microsoft products then definitely look at PowerBI and see if they already have content packs (read out of the box reports) to create some quick dashboards for your boss. Pricing is again FREE for single use or $10 USD per month per user for group company use. It was also really easy to use and create the first report. It has printing limitations on the desktop version but hey it crunches large numbers and visually looks great. Check out the overview below:
Quickbase
The final tool today is quickbase.com. This one isn’t free but worth every penny. Want an online database in one day. Then it is possible using Quickbase. I have found that users love to use it and it is intuitive and flows well. The major problem is the cost. The best option is the 20 users at $25 per user to give the security options required. Once you have a mid sized team that needs an online solution then I have found this works exceptionally well.
So do these tools solve all your problems? Nope not all but I have certainly found that these tools are low cost and effective ways to do things that may cost thousands of dollars and take months even years to implement. With these tools implementation can be done for a few hundred dollars and in weeks if not days. If you want to explore the use of these tools or find out if we have anything else that can help your business please drop me a line at andrea@pqsys.com or call 1(868)769-7962
