A company that grows fast has to be informed about a seemingly endless amount of information: Sales revenue, customer acquisition costs, churn, retention, etc. To create those actionable insights, you could continue doing something like this:
Instead of following a routine like this, you could switch towards using a Business Intelligence (BI) software. A BI tool helps with creating dashboards of summary data, ad-hoc visualizations, and helps in reporting. There are many BI tools but today we'll be looking at an exciting new entrant, Holistics.
Holistics is a self-service BI tool that lets non-technical users to create their own visualizations and insights, without having to involve your data team for requests. Unlike most BI tools, they have a usage-based pricing policy which lowers the financial impact on small to medium sized businesses. All Holistics requires is a basic knowledge of business intelligence, along with a SQL based data warehouse that you can access. If you don't know whether a data warehouse is right for you, see this article.
After signing up for Holistics with your work email, you're guided to add a Data source. Holistics currently accepts 13 different database types including standard ones like Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery and Snowflake. If you're confused about what's the right fit for your organization, we've got you covered. If your data is not neatly centralized into one SQL Data warehouse, consider using Dropbase to automate the process of collecting, cleaning and centralizing your data into an analytics ready-data warehouse. Setting up Holistics with Dropbase is dead simple.
And that's it! You're now ready to use Holistics and analyze your data.
We used the demo account for Holistics and found it extremely easy to set up reports. Some of the features we love:
You can also get a free trial of Holistics for 14 days which we did. We uploaded two datasets to Dropbase: Property prices by state and Education spending in the US. After uploading the data to Dropbase, we copied over the database information to connect the data source to Holistics. Their documentation helped with importing the data. We just wanted to see some basic charts, which were really easy to set up!
After loading in the Education spending data, all I had to do to create a "Filled Map" chart was:
Similarly, creating a Line chart is really simple and takes a few clicks to get this:
Holistics is a fantastic BI tool to use if you'd like to minimize writing code and have a data warehouse already set up. It's pricing policy also makes it very attractive to small to medium startups. The biggest drawback is if you don't have a database and are dealing with only Excel and csv files since Holistics does not support it. In that case, we recommend using Dropbase to collect, clean, and centralize your data to be used with Holistics.