After more than 30 years working with businesses, finance teams and reporting, I have learnt that most finance leaders do not spend much time thinking about what happens to data before it reaches a dashboard.

And I understand why.

What matters is the result. Are the numbers current? Do they agree? Can the board trust them? Can you answer the next question without asking someone to rebuild the report?

The problem is that these questions become much harder to answer when the underlying information sits across an ERP, an accounting platform, operational systems and spreadsheets.

A dashboard may present everything neatly, but a good looking dashboard does not automatically mean you have reliable reporting. What happens to the data before it reaches that dashboard matters just as much as what you eventually see on screen.
that dashboard matters just as much as what you eventually see on screen.

This is where the ETL Process for business intelligence comes in.

ETL stands for Extract, Transform and Load. It sounds technical, but the business purpose is quite simple. You take the relevant data from the systems you already use, prepare it consistently, and make it available to a reporting layer that your team can work with.

For CFOs and finance leaders, understanding this foundation helps explain why reporting can remain frustrating even after new dashboards have been introduced.

Why Connecting Systems Is Only the Beginning

One of the assumptions I often come across is that better reporting starts with connecting all your systems to a dashboard.

That is certainly part of the process, but it is only the beginning.

A connection gives you access to data. It does not automatically make that data consistent, comparable or useful for management reporting.

One system may define a customer differently from another. Product codes may have changed over time. A spreadsheet may contain adjustments that never make their way back into the ERP. Finance may calculate a key metric differently from the operational team.

If you simply take those differences and push them into a dashboard, you have not solved the underlying reporting problem. You have presented it more neatly.

In my experience, this is an important distinction.

A reliable reporting layer needs work beneath the dashboard. The data has to be brought together, checked and structured around definitions that the business agrees on.

What ETL Means in Plain English

ETL describes three connected steps.

Extract means retrieving the relevant information from the systems the business already uses.

Transform means preparing that information so that formats, definitions and calculations are consistent.

Load means placing that prepared information into the structure used for reporting and analysis.

For me, the important part is not the terminology. A finance leader does not need to become an ETL specialist.

What matters is having a controlled path between the original source data and the number that eventually appears in a management pack or dashboard.

When that path is repeatable, you reduce the dependence on someone exporting files, copying columns, correcting formulas and remembering which manual adjustment needs to happen every month.

That is where ETL starts becoming a finance issue rather than simply a technology issue.

Extracting Data From the Systems You Already Use

Many of the businesses I have worked with already have the systems they need to run their operations.

The difficulty is that those systems were built to do different jobs.

Your ERP may handle transactions and financial processes. An operational platform may contain information that finance needs for performance reporting. Important calculations, classifications or adjustments may still sit in key spreadsheets.

That does not necessarily mean those systems need to be replaced.

With Insight BI, our approach is to work with the systems a business already relies on. Relevant data can be extracted in a controlled and repeatable way and brought into the reporting environment. This is important because improving reporting should not mean creating unnecessary disruption across the organisation.

The aim is to establish a dependable reporting foundation around the systems that are already doing their jobs.

Turning Raw Data Into Agreed Business Information

For me, the transformation stage is one of the most important parts of the process.

This is where raw data starts becoming useful management information.

Consider a situation I have seen many times. Two reports show different values for what appears to be the same metric.

People immediately ask which report is wrong.

Sometimes neither report is technically wrong. They may simply be working from different definitions, periods, mappings or adjustments.

That is a reporting problem that another dashboard alone will not solve.

During the transformation process, these differences can be addressed before the information reaches the reporting layer. Data is prepared according to agreed definitions and calculations so that everyone is working from the same basis.

Finance has an important role here.

Technology can process the information, but the business still needs to agree on what a metric actually means. Gross margin, customer categories, portfolio measures and other management metrics need clear definitions if leadership is expected to use them consistently.

Why the Data Model Matters

Once the information has been prepared, it needs structure.

In Business Intelligence, we call this the data model.

I tend to think of the data model as the agreed structure underneath your reports. It connects the relevant information and calculations so that dashboards and reporting packs draw from the same foundation.

At Insight BI, we build and maintain this layer around the definitions and calculations agreed with the business.

One of the reasons this matters is that it reduces the amount of critical reporting logic hidden inside individual spreadsheets and manual processes.

Businesses change.

A new branch opens. A product structure changes. Management introduces another metric. Reporting requirements develop as the organisation grows.

What Good Data Foundations Change for Finance

A strong data foundation does not replace the judgement of an experienced finance team.

It supports it. Instead of rebuilding the same reporting process every month, your team can work with a repeatable flow of information. Agreed metrics can be applied consistently across dashboards and reporting packs. When management asks another question, the team can investigate it within the same reporting environment instead of immediately starting another spreadsheet exercise.

There is also the issue of key person risk.

I have seen many reporting environments where one person knows exactly how everything works.
They know which spreadsheet to open, which formula needs attention, where the manual adjustments are made and which numbers need to be checked before the report goes out.

Those people are incredibly valuable, but that dependence creates risk for the organisation.

Moving important reporting logic into a shared data model makes the process easier to understand, maintain and repeat.

For a CFO, that creates a much clearer line between the original data, the agreed calculations and the information eventually presented to leadership.

Where Insight BI Fits

This thinking is central to how we approach reporting at Insight BI.

We provide a managed reporting layer over the ERP, accounting systems, operational tools and key spreadsheets that a business already uses.

We connect to the relevant sources, structure the information around agreed definitions and present dashboards, reports and automated packs that reflect how the organisation is actually managed.

But the work does not stop once the first dashboard is delivered.

The reporting layer needs to be maintained. Metrics change. Structures change. Management asks different questions. The organisation itself changes.
That is why I do not see ETL and data modelling as once off technical tasks.

They form part of an ongoing reporting environment that needs to remain aligned with the business.

If your management reporting still relies heavily on manual exports, spreadsheet adjustments and knowledge held by a few key people, I would encourage you to look beneath the dashboard.

The question is not only whether the dashboard looks good.

The more important question is whether you can trust the reporting foundation underneath it.

That is the problem we work on at Insight BI.

If you would like to discuss what a managed reporting layer could look like around the systems you already use, get in touch with us.

The post What Happens Between Your ERP and Your Dashboard? A Practical Guide to ETL appeared first on InsightBI.

Fractional CFOs live in a very specific reality.

You carry the responsibility of a CFO, but across several businesses at once. Each client expects clear insight, sound governance and practical guidance, often on a part‑time budget and with limited internal support.

Seeing what needs to change in a business is not usually the hard part. The real constraint is having the time, structure and reliable data to support those decisions across multiple clients, month after month.

This is where managed BI for fractional CFOs makes a difference. A service like Insight BI is not another tool to learn and maintain; it’s a way to lift the standard of reporting for every client you serve, without building a BI team of your own.

The Reality for Most Fractional CFOs

If you work as a Fractional CFO, this may feel familiar.

You step into a business and find an ERP that is underused, a network of spreadsheets that acts as the real reporting system, and a few “temporary” fixes that became permanent. Another client has tidy financials and a strong accountant, but very limited visibility for the board. A third has grown fast and now runs on a mix of systems, shared drives and emailed reports.

The details shift, but a few things stay constant. You are expected to bring board‑level clarity on cash flow, profitability, risk and performance. You quickly become the person who understands how the ERP exports tie into the spreadsheets and manual adjustments. And you almost never have a full BI team backing you.

As your client base grows, the number of reporting processes you support grows with it. That overhead does not scale well. At some point, your capacity is limited less by demand and more by the amount of manual reporting you can absorb.

Insight BI was built with exactly this pattern in mind. It is designed to give finance leaders, including Fractional CFOs, a way to stabilise and improve reporting without having to assemble a separate BI function in every client.

Why Traditional BI Often Misses the Mark

When people hear “Business Intelligence”, they often think of large projects, internal BI teams and long implementation cycles. That picture does not fit comfortably into the world of a Fractional CFO.

Many of your clients are cautious about big BI initiatives. They worry about cost, disruption and whether they have the skills to keep a new platform running. They already feel stretched across multiple systems.

Even when a BI tool is bought, the responsibility for keeping it aligned with reality often drifts back to finance. In practice, that can mean back to you.

What you need is different. You need a way to improve insight that respects the systems your clients already use, that does not turn you into a full‑time BI manager, and that can be applied across multiple clients in a repeatable way.

That is the space where a managed BI service like Insight BI fits.

What Managed BI for Fractional CFOs Looks Like

Managed BI is a service, not just a set of tools. Insight BI combines a platform with the way data is structured and the way reporting is looked after over time.

Viewed from a Fractional CFO’s side, Insight BI usually works like this.

Your clients keep the systems they rely on today. That might be an ERP, an accounting package, line‑of‑business tools and some key spreadsheets. Insight BI connects to these sources and extracts the relevant data in a controlled, repeatable way. A data model is built around agreed definitions and calculations. On top of that model, Insight BI presents dashboards and reports that reflect how the business is actually managed, not just how data happens to be stored.

That reporting layer does not stand still. Metrics are refined, structures are adjusted and reporting is kept in step with changes in the organisation. Insight BI behaves as a managed service that evolves with the business, rather than a fixed set of charts.

You still decide what matters for each client. You still interpret what the numbers mean in the boardroom. But you no longer carry all of the work of stitching reports together, client by client, month after month. Insight BI becomes the stable foundation that your advisory work can rest on.

How Insight BI Helps You Deliver More Value

The test is simple. Does Insight BI allow you to deliver more value to each client without growing a team around you?

In practice, there are three areas where it tends to make a noticeable difference.

A clearer, repeatable view for every client

Most of your clients want a clear picture of performance that the board can understand and trust. They want to see how the business is doing across branches, products or regions, and they want to see it in time to act.

With Insight BI in place, that view is not rebuilt from scratch every reporting cycle. Once the model and dashboards are set up for a client, regular packs can be generated from a stable process. You arrive at meetings with a consistent Insight BI view of the business that everyone recognises, instead of a set of last‑minute spreadsheets.

That consistency not only saves time, it also strengthens confidence in your numbers.

Less dependence on spreadsheet heroes

Many organisations depend heavily on one or two “spreadsheet heroes”. These individuals understand how the complex files work, where every link goes and which manual tweaks are needed. When they are unavailable, everyone feels exposed.

Insight BI helps move critical logic out of individual workbooks and into a shared, transparent model. Definitions and calculations are visible and testable. You and your clients can see how key figures are built up, rather than relying on hidden formulas.

Reporting becomes more resilient, and less tied to single people. As the advisor who helped to put that structure in place, you are associated with that improvement. Other Insight BI clients, for example, cut reporting time by more than 60% after moving their reporting to Insight BI.

Faster, more confident answers

Clients regularly raise questions that do not fit neatly into a standard report. A board member wants to understand exposure to a specific risk. A CEO asks why margin is drifting in one part of the business. A shareholder wants to know which key customers are below target.

In a spreadsheet‑heavy environment, these questions often turn into small projects. With Insight BI, many of them can be explored on screen by adjusting filters, drilling into detail or opening focused views. You stay in the same trusted environment, rather than starting from a blank file.

For your clients, the experience is simpler. Your answers are quicker, clearer and easier to verify.

How to Know You’re Ready for a Managed Approach

You don’t need a formal assessment to see whether your practice is at this point. A few honest questions usually tell you.

Do you rebuild the same reports for each client every month? Does a client’s reporting stop when their one spreadsheet expert is on leave? Do board meetings open with a debate about which numbers are right? Are you turning down work, or squeezing your margins, because manual reporting eats the hours?

If you answered yes to more than one, adding another tool won’t fix it. What helps is a reporting foundation that someone else builds and maintains, so your time goes into advice rather than compilation.

A Different Way to Scale Your Impact

Fractional CFO work rests on trust and clarity. Clients rely on you to make sense of complexity, to frame choices and to stand behind the numbers when decisions are taken.

Insight BI does not replace that role. What it does is give you a stronger, more stable reporting foundation underneath it.

You can lift the reporting standard for each client. You can reduce their dependence on fragile spreadsheets and single points of failure. You can regain hours that would otherwise disappear into manual compilation. And you can do all of this without building a large team of analysts and developers around you.

If this feels close to your reality as a Fractional CFO, it may be worth seeing what a managed BI layer, with a CFO dashboard for each client, could look like in your world. Insight BI connects to the systems you already use and gives you a reporting foundation you can rely on with every client. If you would like to explore that in a practical way, get in touch and we will walk through how Insight BI can support the work you are already doing.

The post How Fractional CFOs Use Managed BI to Deliver More Value Without Growing Their Teams appeared first on InsightBI.

Most businesses don’t suffer from a lack of data.

If you’re running an ERP system, juggling spreadsheets and getting reports from multiple teams, information is not your problem. In many finance functions, the problem is the opposite: too many exports, too many versions, too many debates about which numbers can be trusted.

What’s missing isn’t another feed of data. What’s missing is a higher standard of managed business insight, a way of turning what you already have into decisions you can stand behind.

You don’t need more numbers. You need more from the numbers you already have.

When Reporting Quietly Becomes a Leadership Risk

In a small organisation, reporting is usually treated as an operational chore. Someone pulls data from the system, works late in Excel, builds a few charts and emails a pack. It’s manual and a bit untidy, but it keeps things moving.

As the business grows, that same pattern starts to fail.

Month‑end packs slip, even though the finance team is working flat out. Leadership meetings open with the same two questions: “Which numbers are right?” and “Why do these reports not match?” A few “spreadsheet heroes” are the only people who know how everything fits together. If one of them is on leave, everyone feels it.

At that point, reporting isn’t just back‑office admin anymore. It’s a leadership risk. Decisions take longer than they should. Confidence in the numbers drops. Strategy rests on information that’s late, inconsistent or incomplete.

The usual reaction is to look for more technology. Another dashboard. A new analytics platform. Something more modern and visual.

It looks like progress. It rarely changes the fundamentals.

Why More Tools Don’t Automatically Raise the Standard of Insight

Most CFOs and Fractional CFOs have seen BI demos that look impressive. Screens animate, colours shift, and numbers refresh in real time. On the surface, it feels like the future.

Then the project goes live, and the familiar issues resurface.

Data is still scattered across systems and spreadsheets. Different teams still work off slightly different definitions. Someone is still reconciling figures the night before a board pack goes out, trying to understand why two reports don’t quite agree.

The real problem was never the absence of visualisation. It was the absence of a single, trusted way to move from raw information to insight that’s timely, consistent and clearly tied to how the business is run.

A new tool can make an old problem look prettier. On its own, it doesn’t give you better insight.

What “Managed Business Insight” Actually Means

Raising the standard is less about what software you own and more about how reporting is owned and delivered.

A managed insight layer sits above the systems you already rely on. Your ERP, accounting platform and line‑of‑business tools stay in place. The difference is that data is pulled from them in a controlled way, shaped according to shared rules and presented through one reporting environment that everyone recognises as the source of truth.

Finance no longer spends evenings stitching together exports. The effort shifts from building reports to interpreting what they say.

A managed approach also starts with leadership questions, not database tables. It asks how the business is really managed:

• What does the CFO need to see every day, week and month?
• Which questions are currently hard or slow to answer?
• Where do executives feel blind or exposed?
• How should regional leaders or branch managers see their slice of the story?

Dashboards, reports and alerts are then designed to serve those questions, not just to show whatever happens to be easy to extract.

Because businesses change, a managed insight layer is also continually cared for. Metrics are refined, structures are updated and reporting evolves with the organisation instead of drifting quietly out of date.

In practical terms, it means someone is clearly responsible for the quality, relevance and clarity of your reporting, not just for “building dashboards” once and handing them over.

Why This Matters So Much to CFOs and Fractional CFOs

If you lead finance, the pattern is usually familiar.

You’re expected to provide clear, timely answers on cash flow, profitability, performance by branch or product, and where key trends are heading. At the same time, you may still be the person who truly understands how ERP exports tie into the spreadsheets, which manual adjustments are baked in, and where the fragile points in the numbers sit.

When the organisation is small and stable, that load is heavy but manageable. When the business grows quickly, or when you’re a Fractional CFO supporting several clients, it becomes unsustainable.

One route is to build an internal BI function. For some very large companies, that makes sense. For many mid‑market businesses, the cost, hiring complexity and management overhead put that option out of reach.

A managed BI service offers another path.

You retain control over the questions, the decisions and the relationship with the board or your clients. A partner takes responsibility for designing and running the reporting layer: modelling the data, maintaining dashboards, automating packs and keeping the logic aligned with reality.

That shift changes your role. You move from “chief report compiler” to strategic advisor, without having to become a BI manager on top of everything else.

How to Know You’re Ready for a Managed Approach

You don’t need a complex maturity model to see whether you’re at this point. A few honest reflections are usually enough.
If removing one or two key people would cause your reporting to fall over, your risk is high. If executive meetings routinely begin by sorting out which version of the numbers to trust, your standard of insight is too low. If you’ve invested in tools but Excel is still the engine behind your critical reports, technology hasn’t solved your problem, it’s sitting around it.

In situations like these, another platform will only add another layer. What you need is a better way of managing the insight process end to end.

That starts with a different kind of conversation: one that looks at where reports come from, where they get stuck, who carries the burden and what it costs when leadership doesn’t have a clear, timely view of the business.

You probably don’t need more data. You need more from the data you already have and that only happens when reporting is treated as a managed, ongoing service rather than an afterthought.

The post You Don’t Need More Data. You Need a Higher Standard of Managed Business Insight. appeared first on InsightBI.

When your data lives everywhere

In many companies, information is scattered. Sales sits in one system, finance in another, operations in spreadsheets, and marketing in yet another tool. The result? You spend more time finding numbers than actually understanding them.

This fragmentation creates a few very real issues. Reports don’t match because teams are using different data, decision-making slows down and leadership lacks a clear real-time view of what’s actually happening. It’s not that businesses don’t have data. They often have too much of it, just not in one place.

The “single dashboard” shift

This is where Insight BI’s dashboard feature becomes useful in a very practical way.

By pulling data from different sources into one place, it creates what’s often called a single source of truth. Instead of jumping between tools, you can see your key metrics at a glance.

What makes it more than just a reporting tool is how accessible it becomes. You’re not looking at static spreadsheets anymore, you’re looking at updated visuals that reflect the current state of the business, whenever you need them.

Why this matters in real life

The impact isn’t flashy, but it’s significant. When everything sits in one place: teams stop debating which numbers are correct, managers can spot issues earlier (not weeks later in reports) and decisions become faster and more confident.

It also removes the dependency on manual reporting. Instead of waiting for someone to compile a monthly report, the insights are already there, continuously updated.

A more grounded way to think about it

At its core, this feature isn’t about dashboards, it’s about clarity. Businesses don’t fail because they lack data. They struggle because they can’t see it clearly, quickly, and in context. Bringing everything into one dashboard doesn’t just tidy up your reporting, it changes how decisions get made day to day.

The post When Your Data Lives Everywhere: Why a Single Dashboard Changes Everything appeared first on InsightBI.

Crop insurance – a critical part of the food supply chain – is becoming more efficient and data-driven, thanks to smart dashboards and BI tools.

Willie du Plooy, Managing Director of Gemoedsrus crop insurers, explains that crop insurance is a crucial lifeline for farmers, who generally don’t have the resources to survive one bad crop. However, only around 40% currently insure their crops.

“Many farmers in southern Africa cannot afford crop insurance, since it is not government subsidised in Africa. In many other nations such as the US, it is heavily subsidised by governments,” he says.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) notes that crops are increasingly at risk owing to climate change, which is fanning the spread of pests and increasing floods, drought, diseases and wildfires, and putting least developed countries’ agrifood systems in jeopardy. FAO and World Bank have highlighted insurance as a measure to help improve agricultural resilience.

Matthys Marais, Director at software development company Incasu, says: “Crop insurance is a fairly unknown type of insurance and is, unfortunately, undervalued in South Africa. However, it supports food security.”

He explains that without crop insurance, farmers who lose a crop owing to drought, excess rain, fire, frost or pests like locusts risk crippling losses. Many farmers have heavy debt, so they cannot afford a single bad season. Those adequately covered by crop insurance are able to protect their livelihoods and – if an incident occurs early in the season – also potentially replant that year’s crop.

Matthys Marais explains that the agricultural insurance sector is subject to the same seasonal impacts their customers are. He notes that crop insurance is complex – some years are good and some are not. Therefore, insurers must harness digital technologies that allow them to operate as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible.

Marius Marais, co-founder of MJR Solutions – developer of the AgriHost software platform and underwriting system with Insight BI software by Incasu – says digital solutions reduce the resources needed and costs involved in agricultural insurance. AgriHost – the first solution of its kind in the world – is a digital suite of applications for fast and accurate crop insurance underwriting, loss adjustments, reporting and forecasting.

Moving to digital simplifies what can be a complicated loss adjustment process. Marius Marais explains that insurance premiums and coverage are based on the field’s size and crop type, among other factors. “A farmer might have a variety of different crops on different fields. Just capturing all this information used to take all day. Now, the app calculates it all in real-time.”

Du Plooy says that, where previously, a loss adjuster would have had to capture data on paper, then spend hours doing calculations and send them to headquarters for claims processing, using a centralised platform slashes the time taken for these processes. “The technology helps keep our costs down,” he says. “We can run with fewer people and greater accuracy and save at least 7% in costs. Using an app, as you do the work, it sends it up to the server at the HQ site and we can process a claim in as little as one hour, whereas it previously took two weeks to finish a claim. For the farmer, it’s a faster return of his money – he can get a payout in as little as a week.

“We can capture the data on a per-field level based on geolocation. In the past, if a farmer complained that the assessor wasn’t in the field, it was hard to prove that he was. However, now we have GPS co-ordinates and time stamps to track where they were, so we are more transparent. We can capture and analyse data per region, review historical trends and inform risk management and forecasting,” Du Plooy says.

Building on this digital foundation, BI could also be used to map trends over time, as well as being deployed to help farmers manage risk and improve their planning and forecasting, Matthys Marais adds.

The post Crop insurance boosts food security for SA appeared first on InsightBI.

But what value can it add, and where to start? In this article, we present an approach to get more value from BI tools and be agile in making business decisions.

Management simplicity

To maximise the potential of BI capabilities, a top-down approach can especially be useful. With this approach, management-focuses are implemented as colourful visual cues on dashboards for quick evaluation. The process can be repeated for managers on other levels where BI insights can contribute to their decision-making.

One such a strategy is the balanced scorecard approach. It uses a standardised structure for reporting, albeit applied in varied formats by organisations. This strategy is a pragmatic technique to monitor cause-and-effect of activities within the organisation, using the feedback from outcomes to further adjust activities for improvement.

The classical balanced scorecard perspectives (or focuses) are financial, customer, processes and learning-and-growth. Outputs from one perspective are used as inputs to the next perspective, eventually contributing to the profit metric of the financial perspective.

Using these four perspectives, the dashboards can be designed to reflect metrics from each perspective, using elements like graphs for comparison, geo-mapping for distribution and tabular data for volumes. The result can be a very elegant combination of useful information portions, that collectively provide insight into the organisation’s activities and outcomes.

Data from where?

From a regulatory point of view, a major source for BI will be data from the organisation’s financials. Whether sourced from accounting systems or from spreadsheets used internally, there will likely always be a digital version available.

Depending on the nature of the organisation, other feeds may come from areas like HR, manufacturing, logistical operations and marketing. A rule of thumb for data availability should be: if it is important for business then it should already be measured.

The format in which feeds are available can vary significantly. BI tools in general should be able to accept data any format. Again, a rule of thumb regarding data format is that data in a spreadsheet is the most common format used globally.

A key aspect for success in data sourcing is to have representative data sets from all areas included in the management perspectives. Even in areas that do not have substantial and well-represented data sources available, by starting with a minimal (but accurate) data set, the results of BI will already be valuable. As the internal understanding and appreciation of BI matures, new efforts can be made in those areas to improve the data sets.

Process

An effective BI system grows to maturity over time. By following specific steps in the sequence showed, iterative improvements can be made both to the quality of data sets, and to the design of BI dashboards used by management.

Feeds from external factors (like changes in market prices or tax rates) may equally be important to the iterative process used.

This process and its effectiveness can be reviewed at any appropriate time-interval but should preferably always be done when an important change in business objectives or external factors has occurred.

Benefits

Tangible benefits from using BI can firstly be drawn from having a full glance of business activities on one dashboard, highlighting red spots that might need attention. Secondly, adherence to organisational compliance requirements are easily measured and reported on. Lastly and most importantly, the profitability of the organisation can always be visible.

Conclusion

If the saying is true, that a picture is worth a thousand words, then using organisational data to produce pictures in a BI dashboard should be worth more than a million words every day. The result of continuous BI improvements will most definitely result in improved savings and profits.

BI tools are invaluable in the plan-measure-evaluate feedback loop for an organisation. The “science” of business intelligence has become very practical to use in everyday business and is definitely worth a look for managers.

-Hendrik van Zyl

The post A beginner’s guide for business intelligence appeared first on InsightBI.

Specialist insurer Cross Country Insurance Consultants is achieving better reporting and insights to grow the business with the implementation of advanced BI and analytics tools from software development firm Incasu.

Cross Country Insurance Consultants offers insurance products for outdoor, 4×4 and marine small craft and equipment, as well as specialised vintage and veteran car and motorcycle cover, and hunting cover. The company has deployed Incasu’s Insight BI and Insight Analytics to gain real-time visibility, automated reporting and insights to drive strategic decision-making. This has supported above-average growth for the company.

Jaco Janse van Rensburg, General Manager at Cross Country Insurance Consultants, says the move to Incasu came during the COVID-19 lockdown, when all insurers were challenged in reporting and staying profitable.

He notes: “Insurance is one of oldest businesses in the South African market, and has been behind the technology adoption curve. Our business had been operational for 24 years and, despite digital advances, there was still a lot of paperwork and time-consuming manual reporting involved. With around 780 brokers in our network, we need to stay in contact with all our brokers and the market. This means driving to brokers and seeing them face to face. During COVID-19, we were removed from that and our reporting fell months behind. COVID-19 exposed our digital immaturity and we became concerned about trends and potential loss of business.”

Cross Country Insurance sought to understand the business at a click of a button. The company worked with Incasu on a BI system that integrated data from multiple systems and databases, to give a single dashboard reflecting the most important data.

Janse van Rensburg says: “We had very specific requirements, so the solution was fully customised for us to report on areas like loss ratios, costs and various aspects of a claim, variables inside claims and premiums, and where we are losing business – even down to what demographic. It was quite a lengthy project, but it has delivered what we required. Now we are at a point where even our insurer identifies and values the data and insight capabilities we can provide.”

Rohan Mouton, business data analyst at Incasu, says: “We pull all the data that needs to be analysed and sit with clients to determine what information they need to have at a glance. We also design custom reports so they don’t have to build reports from scratch. These reports can also be scheduled to be automatically sent via e-mail.”

The system has delivered significant benefits and measurable improvements for the business. Janse van Rensburg says: “It has given us the ability to meet brokers already knowing what their problems are and go in with possible solutions. We no longer walk in blind, the engagements are much more meaningful and we can solve problems faster.”

“Operationally, it’s made my job a lot easier. I oversee underwriting and new business and am also the business manager responsible for the operational direction of the company. I used to access the necessary information manually. Reports that might once have taken two to three months are now updated daily on my dashboards. I can also review everything per section, which is useful if I want to report back to the insurer or see the profitability of one section alone.”

Incasu’s Insight Analytics solution is now being implemented and customised to further enhance the company’s ability to harness data for growth.

Daniel van Graan, software developer at Incasu, explains that Insight Analytics is designed to help professionals make decisions based on historical data. “We are looking at around 24 years of data, applying statistical techniques to create mathematical models that help bring to light trends that aren’t really visible on the live reports.”

Janse van Rensburg says: “With easy access to market trends data, historical data and current data, we are better positioned to predict how the market is moving. When drawing up our strategy and sales plan, I can rapidly gauge what happened in the past and predict our growth this year. Without access to this information, it would have taken months.”

Incasu tools have given Janse van Rensburg more time to focus on growing the business. He says: “The systems have changed the scope of what I do. Where I used to be largely office-bound, working on information, I now have time to work on bigger projects and scope new niche products with partners. The future holds several exciting new business ventures for Cross Country Insurance Consultants.

“Incasu has enabled us to move into the 4IR, free up resources and grow the business,” he says.

The post Cross Country Insurance gets smarter, bigger with Incasu appeared first on InsightBI.

When you have eventually figured out your own system that works for you and it feels like your head is finally above water, your boss asks for a report that requires data from multiple files in your hierarchy of folders within folders. Finally, you get to the correct file. Great! One column from that file, then the search begins all over again for the next column. Copy all the columns required into a new spreadsheet and there you have it, 5 hours later, your report is complete. You are proud to present the new custom report. Your boss is very impressed! Then they drop the bombshell: “Can we have this report every Monday morning by 8 am please?”

See Your Data With INSIGHT And Know Your Business Inside

With INSIGHT there are so many ways in which you can address various issues, just like the one above. Let’s take a look at the 10 ways as to how INSIGHT can make your life (and your data) an absolute breeze:

1. Custom reports and retrieve up-to-date data with the click of a button.
2. Automate your customised reports to be sent out at any time, on specific days or every day at whichever time you like.
3. Create dashboards to visually display the data information, rather than just staring at numbers.
4. Have charts showing trends and forecasts of your data.
5. If your business has multiple branches, the map view can help you see which are the best performers. With crop insurance, there can be drilled down to see specifics on each individual farm and land.
6. Your budget can be monitored.
7. Rather than building spreadsheets manually and by the time you are done, your data is outdated, INSIGHT will keep the data updated and relevant at all times.
8. Thresholds can indicate when certain areas of your business need special attention.
9. Various charts, graphs and tables can present your data in such a way that there is bound to be a way to display the data to suit everyone’s needs.
10. Access control gives you complete privacy as to who is able to see what they are meant to.

To get peace of mind about how your business is really doing and have your finger on the pulse of your business, feel free to enquire about a demo to see just what INSIGHT can do for you. Our team at Incasu are sure to be able to address the pain points of your company and INSIGHT might just be the tip of the iceberg of things they could help your business with. Feel free to give us a shout.

The post 10 Ways To Get INSIGHT On Your Business appeared first on InsightBI.