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Integration and BI tools: 100 answers
Plain-language answers on integration and bi tools for small and mid-sized companies, from Zansa.
- Why do my Xero and Shopify sales numbers never match each other?
- How do I reconcile sales figures between my till system and my accounting software?
- What is ETL and how is it different from ELT?
- What is dbt and does a small business need it?
- What is a star schema and why does it matter for dashboards?
- Should a small company use BigQuery, Snowflake or Postgres as its data warehouse?
- How does Snowflake pricing work in general terms?
- Is Postgres good enough as a reporting database for a small business?
- Metabase vs Power BI: which is better for a small company?
- Is Looker Studio good enough for business reporting?
- When is Tableau worth it compared with cheaper BI tools?
- Can Excel be used as a business intelligence tool?
- How can I tell when my spreadsheets have outgrown Excel?
- What is a data pipeline in plain English?
- How do APIs let me pull data out of business systems?
- How do I connect Xero to a BI tool or database?
- How do I get Sage data into a reporting database?
- Can I connect QuickBooks to Power BI or Metabase?
- How do I pull Shopify data into a data warehouse?
- How do I connect WooCommerce to reporting tools?
- How can I get data out of an old till or point-of-sale system?
- How do I integrate an ERP with a BI tool?
- How do I combine CRM data with finance data in one report?
- What is master data and why does it matter?
- How do I remove duplicate customers from my data?
- How do I clean messy Excel data without doing it manually every month?
- What are data tests and which ones matter most?
- How do I monitor data pipelines so I know when they break?
- What should data documentation include for a small company?
- What is a data dictionary and how do I create one?
- Why does the same KPI show different values in different dashboards?
- What is a semantic layer in business intelligence?
- How do per-user BI licence costs add up as my team grows?
- Should I self-host my BI tool or use a cloud version?
- Can I embed dashboards in my own website or application?
- What is row-level security in BI and when do I need it?
- What are the core principles of good dashboard design?
- Which chart type should I use for different business questions?
- What is the difference between a data warehouse, data lake and database?
- How do I handle currency and exchange rates in combined reports?
- Why do dates and time zones cause mismatched reports?
- How should I reconcile data between two systems step by step?
- What is a data model and why should small businesses care?
- What is a fact table and what is a dimension table?
- What does 'grain' mean in a data model and why does it cause double counting?
- How do I deal with handwritten or paper records in my data?
- Can OCR reliably extract data from invoices and scanned documents?
- What is the best way to import CSV files into a database reliably?
- How can I automate weekly Excel reports so nobody copies and pastes?
- What is Power Query and how does it help with data preparation?
- What are the downsides of using Google Sheets as a data source for dashboards?
- How do I choose a BI tool for my business?
- What are the limitations of Power BI for small teams?
- How should I handle personal data in dashboards and pipelines?
- What is the difference between batch and real-time data integration?
- How do I keep a history of changes when source systems overwrite data?
- What are slowly changing dimensions in simple terms?
- How do partitioning and clustering speed up queries in BigQuery?
- What SQL skills does a small business need for reporting?
- Is it safe to connect a BI tool directly to my production database?
- How do I reconcile stock levels between my ERP, warehouse and online shop?
- How do I match bank transactions to invoices automatically?
- What does a good data refresh failure alert look like?
- How do I test whether a dashboard number is correct?
- What is the difference between a metric, a dimension and a measure?
- How should I name tables and columns in a data warehouse?
- How can version control help with analytics code and dashboards?
- How do I handle missing values in business data?
- How do I standardise product names and categories across systems?
- Why do totals change after I refresh my report?
- How do I explain data discrepancies to non-technical managers?
- What should a Data Health Check for a small business cover?
- What does Zansa's fixed-fee Data Health Check involve for a small business?
- What is a Foundation Build in a data project?
- Who owns the data models and dashboards when an agency builds them?
- Why does Zansa usually use Metabase for dashboards?
- Which data sources can Zansa connect for a small company?
- How does Zansa handle privacy laws such as POPIA and GDPR?
- Does Zansa use AI tools, and what happens to my data?
- How much does it cost to set up a data warehouse and dashboards for a small business?
- What is the typical process for starting a data project with Zansa?
- What does the name Zansa mean and where does it come from?
- Which industries benefit most from a unified data model?
- How can a retailer combine online and in-store sales into one view?
- How do I measure true profit when revenue and costs sit in different systems?
- Why is my Excel pivot table giving different totals from my accounting report?
- What is a data gateway and when do I need one?
- How do I decide between building integrations myself and buying a connector tool?
- Is Airbyte, Fivetran or a custom script better for loading data?
- How should I schedule and orchestrate data jobs?
- How do I deal with duplicated rows after loading data?
- What are NULLs and why do they break calculations?
- How do I give clients or franchisees their own dashboard securely?
- What is the difference between a report and a dashboard?
- How do I measure whether a BI project is delivering value?
- How do I move from spreadsheets to a proper data setup without disrupting the business?
- Can I use BigQuery with Power BI and Metabase at the same time?
- What does a data engineer do compared with a data analyst?
- Do small companies need machine learning, or is BI enough?
- What happens to my dashboards if the person who built them leaves?