Property Management
Hearing about Power BI’s powerful functionality, and AMS’s knack for creating dashboards that actually drive decisions, a leading CPA firm asked AMS to come up with a BI solution for one of their largest clients, Property Management.
Problem
Property Management has rental properties in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Australia. Managing financial details for each property was burdensome and left executives feeling devoid of “the big picture”. The company had over 2.5 million rows of detailed, tabular data, and managers lacked the ability to easily drill down to assess each property’s financial performance.
To gain meaningful insights, executives would have to analyze multiple income statements. They found it difficult to answer even simple questions, such as:
• How do the income statements compare to one another, year over year?
• How does gross profit versus gross profit margin figures compare for properties in the United States versus Canada, over time?
• Which European property had the most favorable ratio of revenues to expenses?
In addition, executives required better information to make critical investment and expansion decisions, such as which country is best for expansion opportunities, and which country has the greatest profitability by organization. They needed to know if it was wise to expand.
Solution
Realizing their frustration, CPA firm wanted to provide a solution. At a Power BI talk given by AMS, the CPA firm had learned about Power BI’s functionality, and wanted to offer it to the company as a service. AMS used Power BI to invigorate once static income statements, giving managers insights and the ability to explore the data in order to make critical financial decisions.
All parties involved are now able to see high level information through a single pane of glass. Now, managers and their accounting team can easily:
• Drill down to each level of a property’s income statement and make comparisons over time.
• Determine variances in Cost of Sales and other metrics.
• Determine which region is ripe for expansion and which may be hurting the company financially.
This list goes on.
Value
In this case, the value Power BI provided is two-fold. The executives benefited from new strategic insights. The CPA firm was able to deliver a powerful solution, increasing their value to the client.
Using Power BI, AMS transformed data into a strategic asset, empowering managers and the accounting team to make informed decisions about each property.
