In 2020, as many as 54% of businesses stated that cloud-based BI was essential to their present and future goals. That number is likely to grow, considering business analytics (an umbrella term that includes business intelligence) can help make business decision-making up to 5x faster.
The term “Business Intelligence” (BI) has been in use since the 1860s, though it has been credited to the consultant Howard Dresner for first using it to refer to the support for making decisions in a business context, according to SearchBusinessAnalytics.
Although often interchanged with data analytics, BI is different, as analytics encompasses both BI and analytics applications.
This article will examine why high-risk merchants like you should take BI seriously and how you could use it to improve your businesses’ processes.
There are so many options you can choose from when it comes to paying your vendors. This article will help you determine what options may suit you best so you can make an informed choice.
We will explore the following topics:
- Why Business Intelligence?
- How does BI work?
- Collecting Data is Only a First Step
- What Are Some Important Metrics To Consider When Looking At BI Data?
- How Can L3 Help You?
Without further ado, let’s dive right in!
Why Business Intelligence?
BI software is essential for high-risk merchants who want to track data and use their data to improve their business. Using BI can be essential for your business, so let’s explore some of the reasons why.
BI allows high-risk merchants like you to take data and turn it into action so you can make well-informed decisions for your business.
According to CIO.com, you can use BI tools to attain and analyze assorted data sets from various metrics, including “reports, summaries, dashboards, graphs, charts and maps.”
You can attain knowledge of these metrics through various tools, including reporting tools, data warehousing, data visualization, and interactive dashboards.
In other words—BI gives you tools to ensure you can get access to business insights that are simple to understand, making life easier for you.
But let’s get into the nitty-gritty.
How does BI Work?
BI works through utilizing data. To formulate the data, you can use BI to reflect both historical information and collect data that evolves as it’s generated in real-time.
Once this happens, you can utilize various BI tools—some of which we’ll explore later in this article—to develop smart business decisions backed up by data.
Your BI software will use data from various source systems before pulling them together—using data integration and data quality management tools—to ensure that your business is analyzing the correct information.
Some of the steps that go through the BI process include:
- Data prep, where your businesses’ data sets are organized and formed so you can analyze them
- The phase of analytical querying that goes through prepped data
- Delivery of key performance indicators to you and other relevant business personnel
- The utilization of data info to help you make more informed business decisions
But of course, it’s important to implement what you learn through the use of BI rather than just using it to collect data. This brings us to our next point.
Collecting Data is Only a First Step
Merely collecting data is only the first step for any high-risk business looking to use BI—it’s not enough in and of itself. For data to be useful, an analysis of the data is essential.
Therefore, data must be simple enough to understand and—if a merchant encounters any issues—they should act accordingly to mitigate them.
Especially during a time that “Big Data” is trending, the need to understand vast amounts of data has increased in prominence for all merchants, including high-risk ones like you.
Things like purchasing patterns and trends can come to light through data analysis, so understanding what to do with your data could be the difference between make or bust for your business.
Ask yourself—is it better to make informed insights, or should your business and livelihood rely on guesswork?
With data, you can understand your customers better (including their buying habits). Data collection used to take place each quarter though reports that had to be tracked manually. Data analysis now happens in real time, and you are always able to use the information.
Furthermore, when you do data analysis, you can use a visualization tool to see metrics in a way that suits you best.
What Are Some Important Metrics To Consider When Looking At BI Data?
There are plenty of important metrics to consider when you look at BI data for your business— let’s explore some of them briefly.
- Active MIDS. This shows the total count of any MID with sales in the current month.
- Mid Performance. This shows any MIDS that have a plus or minus sales change of 10% with MIDS that have greater than or equal to $10k in MTD sales volume.
- Previous Month Sales. This does exactly what it sounds like—shows you what and when you sold items/services in the last month.
- Total Sales. This shows the number of sales you had in the previous 12 months.
- Projected Volume. This is an estimate of the number of sales you’ll make in the next month.
- YTD Comparison. This displays YTD sales today compared with previous YTD sales.
- Portfolio Health. This displays the MTD sales compared to previous MTD sales (indicated by the $ amount and line on the gauge) along with a "goal" figure which is a static number we’ve set based on an average sales month.
- Wizards. This gives you the ability to add data manually.
How Can L3 Help You?
L3 has decades of collective experience improving the business processes of high risk merchants in many different industries. From subscription services like adult or online dating, to product fulfillment such as CBD or nutra merchants, we’ve optimized payment services for them all.
Pooling from our own data, we’ve utilized our experience to guide the development of analytics tools which account for different factors necessary to monitor different business types.
We also spend a great deal of time around risk mitigation factors that are crucial to all internet merchants, high risk or otherwise. Chargebacks can be the death of a business and our tools help monitor this important element.
Conclusion
Overall, BI is essential for a healthy business, especially if you’re a high risk merchant.
BI has so many benefits, like speeding up and improving decision making, increasing the efficacy of internal business processes, uncovering essential issues, spotting new market and business trends, allowing you to come up with better business strategies, increasing your number of sales and revenue, and helping you get one up on your rivals.
With all these advantages, and with so many businesses increasingly using BI—including your direct competitors—you should seriously consider using BI.
If you need help, contact one of our experts today!
sales@l3payments.com
800-277-7785
