.webp)
Zebra BI for Power BI
Dashboards are a powerful tool for financial controllers to manage and improve a company's financial performance. They make it possible to make data-driven decisions and react more quickly to changes in the business environment. To ensure that dashboards provide relevant and accurate information, they should be carefully designed and regularly updated. The Power BI Ad-In Zebra BI provides financially compliant visualization capabilities.
Dashboards provide an effective way to display and visualize financial information and key figures in real time, which significantly improves decision-making and the monitoring of financial performance. However, they should be clearly laid out and designed according to IBCS standards. Power BI provides a good basis for this, but a lot of individual adjustments are sometimes necessary to ensure that the visualization is clear and understandable and accurately conveys the controlling messages. Zebra BI is therefore particularly suitable for financial experts, controllers, analysts and other professionals who need to visualize and analyze financial and controlling data.
Zebra BI as a must-have in controlling
Zebra BI is a business intelligence software and an extension for Power BI, Excel and PowerPoint. CEO Andrej Lapajne founded the company of the same name, headquartered in Slovenia, and developed the software to facilitate the creation of engaging and meaningful reports and dashboards in Excel and Power BI. Zebra BI aims to simplify and improve the creation and presentation of financial reports and analyses by providing powerful visualization tools and automation features. Controlling-oriented areas such as HR or sales, which regularly evaluate their plan and forecast values in order to keep an eye on employee statistics or sales figures, for example, also benefit from the use of Zebra BI.
The software also offers the option of integrating data from various sources and displaying it in meaningful graphics and diagrams to support well-founded business decisions.
One example of this is profit and loss statements. They can be easily displayed with Zebra BI and are also more customizable than with the standard Power BI table. Deviations are calculated automatically and previous year, plan and forecast values are added to the visualization. For Power BI, Zebra BI offers the visualization types Cards, Charts, and Tables. Cards make it possible to display individual KPIs and key figures on a dashboard. Tables can be used to display data in tabular form. Charts are used to display various diagrams in a visualization. The user can switch between visualization types such as waterfall charts, area charts, line charts, bar charts or lollipop charts. The visualization via Zebra BI is certified by Microsoft.
Advantages of Zebra BI
Compared to the Power BI standards, Zebra BI has very modern and clear visualizations that are designed to generate quick insights. Absolute and percentage deviations, for example, are displayed directly and do not have to be laboriously optimized via many individual calculations and format adjustments, as is usual in Power BI.
Reports are created very quickly with Zebra BI, as many calculations (variances) that would otherwise have to be created with measures in Power BI are mapped directly with the visual. The dashboards remain consistent in design, as they are created in accordance with the International Business Communication Standards (IBCS). Financial reports in particular can be mapped very well and even better with Zebra BI than in Power BI. Compared to conventional Power BI tables, users benefit from the numerous possible adjustments, such as inserting a calculated row, formatting certain rows (background color, font, etc.) or inverting rows (sign).
"If customers have never heard of Zebra BI before, I often suggest it if necessary. But I also have customers who have already worked with Zebra BI at their previous employer and were totally fascinated, so they want to continue working with it anyway." - Anna Maria Steffens, Data Consultant, taod
The dynamic comments that can be added to visualizations are also practical. Anomalies, such as sales figures that are far too low in one month, can be briefly explained directly on the spot. Each user can decide for themselves which type of visualization is easier for them to understand. The reports can be displayed with different visualizations using Zebra BI. Moreover, such functions are very easy and intuitive to use.
All-round ease of use
Zebra BI for Power BI is very easy to install. The three visualization types are simply added via AppSource in Power BI Desktop. All that remains to be done is to enter the license key. Using the ad-in is also easy for users with basic Power BI knowledge. If you would like to learn more about the functionalities of Zebra BI, you can find out more in the numerous crash courses in short video formats on Zebra BI | Actionable Reporting Made Easy. As is so often the case, the license costs for the tool depend on the user's requirements. From the free version to the enterprise version, all requirements are covered by different price models.
This article first appeared in issue 02/23 of our magazine data! You can find all issues and articles here:
data! Magazine: Cloud Services, Data Analytics & AI | taod
