A business intelligence system is a software system that collects and analyzes a company's internal and external data from a wide range of data sources.
 

The purpose of using business intelligence is to optimize a company's earnings and competitiveness by presenting data as usable and understandable knowledge to support both business-critical decisions at the management level and operational decisions and actions at the employee level.
 

In practice, a business intelligence system works a bit like a highly advanced and self-sustaining Excel sheet.

Instead of endless rows of manually entered and updated spreadsheets, you get results, statistics, and analyses presented directly in your dashboard (your customized control panel in the business intelligence system) in easy-to-understand graphs, charts, and curves.
 

The information on your dashboard is based on data from all your source systems (such as ERP systems, financial systems, inventory management systems, etc.). With just a few clicks, you can change the layout and delve into the numbers behind the results. You can also change the periods or angles you want to see in your business intelligence system, providing easy access to causal explanations and relationships as well as predictions of future performance.
 

The business intelligence system also allows you to automate the generation and distribution of, for example, management reports to the board, budget follow-up to the CEO, sales statistics to the sales manager, trip logs to the drivers, and time and material calculations to the project managers, so you also free up time from repetitive manual tasks and can focus on other tasks.