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Using Power BI to combine Financial and Social Data for More Powerful Analytics
In my last blog post we talked about Power BI Designer Preview and why I was lovin’ it. In this post I’m going to use Microsoft’s most recently Power BI tool to connect to my SQL server instance to analysis my Google Analytics data, Marketing data and CRM opportunities.
Connect to your SQL Data
Let’s get started by selecting the Get Data button in the top left corner and then select SQL Server
Zero in on ZIP code risk
Internet and mobile sales continue to grow in popularity among shoppers and profitability for retailers. Last year, online sales in the U.S. topped $307 billion. The lucrative internet marketplace has also led to more online crime. Recent cyberattacks on U.S. businesses, which affected such titans of industry as Target, JPMorgan Chase, Home Depot and Premera, has Congress scrambling to craft laws to protect businesses and consumers against data breaches. And in 2014, businesses lost an estimated $3.5 trillion globally from retail fraud. Online sellers took the biggest hit, according to LexisNexis, primarily due to losses from card-not-present (CNP) transactions.
Power BI & Dynamics CRM Online 2015
The Power BI preview released by Microsoft in Convergence provided a great tool to quickly make sense of large amounts of data. Power BI does all the heavy lifting and provides a quick and easy way to interact with the data. As promised by Microsoft with the release of Dynamics CRM Online 2015 Update 1 CRM is now available within PowerBI alongside SalesForce & Google Analytics to gather data and provide data analysis. As of publishing this article the Power BI Dynamics CRM connector will only work with Dynamics CRM Online, it will not work with an on premise CRM installation, hopefully the on premise connectivity is not too far.
Non for Profit .. What options are there out there for you using Dynamics GP
Fund accounting by definition is an accounting system emphasizing accountability rather than profitability. This is used by non-profit organizations and governments. Most ERP systems are designed to emphasize on profitability not accountability. Dynamics GP has options for this that will assist you in spending less time managing funding and accounting processes and more time on your mission. The modules available in Dynamics GP are interfund accounting, control account management, encumbrance management, commitments, and grant management. Below we will give you the details of each module and how it can help.
Uploading Fixed Assets into Acumatica ERP
In previous blog posts, we have learned how two ways to get fixed asset purchases into Acumatica ERP. The first was entering them manually and the other was to create the fixed asset records from purchases. Both of these methods work and are extremely efficient when entering a few fixed assets. In some situations, your company may purchase many fixed assets at the same time which would make manual entry a long laborious process. Using the built in function of Integration Services in Acumatica ERP, one can quickly create a routine that will import multiple fixed assets into the system using data from an Excel spreadsheet.
6 CRM Software Trends to Keep Your Business Ahead
1. More SaaS (Software as a Service, Storage as a Service)
KTL’s 10th Annual User Conference: Recap
Can you believe KTL has been throwing a successful and continuously growing User Conference for the past 10 years!? To be honest, neither could we. It’s amazing how our clientele are so loyal; how they and many others want to learn more about the dynamics world that Microsoft has offered. Yes, the beginning idea of this conference ten years ago, was something that KTL thought would grow and hopefully become an annual educational event that we could host for our clients. And it has become that….and much more!
Make the Most of Your CRM System; Engage Your Staff to Engage Your Customers
We are not talking about the obvious such as how much of your budget to spend or about technical considerations, we are talking about what questions to ask and what decisions to make before searching for the Customer Relationship Management system that best suits your organization.
Five Tips on Understanding SQL Server Better
Being a developer I often find myself in situations where I need to troubleshoot SQL queries that are not performing well and generally need optimizations. I would like to share some interesting tips on how SQL Server handles queries and what execution plans might be better than others. A query execution plan is an ordered set of steps that are used to access the data in SQL server. If you are working with SQL Server Management Studio once you have started a new query window click the following button 
(or CTRL + M) so you can enable execution plans. In the examples below I will be using tables from AdventureWorks database which is a sample database provided by Microsoft.
