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Most businesses collect far more data than they ever use. It comes in from your finance system, your CRM, your operations tools and the spreadsheets people keep on their own desktops.
Gathering it is the easy part. Knowing what to do with it is where most organisations get stuck.
So here’s the short answer. There are five things you can actually do with your data:
The rest of this blog takes each one in turn, with the Microsoft tools that make it practical and a sense of what good looks like.
Data on its own does nothing. It sits in storage, costing money, waiting.
It becomes useful the moment it changes something. A decision made with more confidence. An afternoon of manual work saved.
The problem is rarely a shortage of data. It’s that the data lives in too many places, in formats that don’t talk to each other. Getting a straight answer means someone exporting from three systems and stitching it together in Excel by hand, and by the time the report is ready the moment to act has passed.
Everything below closes that gap between having data and getting something out of it.
The most immediate thing you can do with your data is see it clearly.
A dashboard built in Power BI pulls figures from across your systems into one live view, so your sales numbers and your operating costs sit side by side and update on their own. Nobody waits for the monthly report. The people making decisions can see where things stand at any point and act on it.
We worked with Otsuka to move their reporting off Excel and into Power BI. That cut 4 days of manual processing and gave the team that time back for the decisions themselves rather than the spreadsheets behind them.
Good analytics answers the questions you already ask every week, faster and with less doubt about whether the numbers are right.
Once your data is in order, it can do more than report the past. It can give you a fair view of what happens next.
Forecasting reads the patterns in your history and projects them forward: the stock you’ll need next quarter, or the customers drifting towards leaving before they actually go.
Power BI and Microsoft Fabric bring machine learning into this without a data science team on staff, so the modelling runs on your own numbers and updates as new data arrives.
Seeing a shift early gives you room to plan around it, while you still have options.
A lot of what people call working with data isn’t analysis at all. It’s admin.
It’s the low-value handling that fills a working week:
Power Automate takes that off their plate. Invoices get captured and logged without manual entry. Records update across systems the moment something changes. Reports build and send on a schedule with nobody touching them.
We automated our own invoice processing and cut invoice handling time by 60%, taking the approval chasing off people’s desks entirely.
Speed is the obvious gain. The one that matters more is consistency, because work that runs automatically runs the same way every time, and that strips out the small errors that creep in when a person repeats a task a hundred times. Your team gets their hours back, and the data they hand on is cleaner for it.
The newest thing you can do with your data is hand it to an AI agent.
An agent is software that takes a request in plain English and acts on what it finds in your data. Build one in Copilot Studio, connect it to what you already hold in Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365, and it can draft a proposal from your CRM records or pull a report together from scattered project notes without a person doing the legwork.
This is where organised data pays off twice. An agent is only as good as the data it can reach, so the businesses getting real value from AI tend to be the ones who sorted their data first.
We build custom agents like this in eight days through Agents in 8, working with the systems a business already runs on. We worked with WeChange.AI to build a proposal agent that now saves them 7-10 hours a week and has lifted their win rate by 20%+.
Every use above rests on one thing: your data being in a fit state to use. This is the step that gets skipped, and it’s usually why data projects stall.
In most organisations, data is scattered across systems that were never built to work together. Microsoft Fabric brings it into one place, so your reporting, forecasting, automation and AI all draw on the same trusted source instead of a dozen that disagree.
Get the foundation right first, and everything above gets faster and more reliable. Skip it, and you spend your time explaining why two reports show different numbers.
We did exactly this for a plant hire firm, unifying their data with Microsoft Fabric and Power Platform. It now saves them £97k a year.
This is why Bespoke treats AI, automation and analytics as one conversation. They run on the same foundation, and the businesses that get real value build that foundation first.
In fact, you shouldn’t try.
The organisations that get value from their data usually start with one problem worth solving. A report that eats a day every month. A forecast nobody trusts.
You don’t need a big budget or a rip-and-replace project to begin either. Most of this runs on Microsoft licences you’re probably already paying for, working alongside your current systems rather than replacing them.
The harder part is knowing which problem to start with and what it’ll actually take. That’s what a Triple A Assessment is for: a one-day engagement that looks across your AI, automation and analytics options and hands you a ranked list of where the value is and a clear first step.
If your data is doing less than it should, that’s the place to start.
In a business, you use it to make decisions and remove work. That means reporting on how you’re performing, forecasting what’s ahead, automating the manual handling and, increasingly, feeding it to AI agents that act on it. On its own data does nothing. It earns its place when it changes a decision or saves someone time.
The main uses fall into five groups: reporting and dashboards, forecasting and prediction, automating manual processes, powering AI agents and unifying scattered data into one reliable source. Most data projects are a version of one of these.
The same things larger ones can, at a smaller scale. One dashboard pulling sales and costs into a single view, or an automation that handles invoicing, can be built without a big team or budget. Start with one clear problem.
Pick one problem worth solving rather than launching a broad data programme. A Triple A Assessment is a one-day way to see where the value is across AI, automation and analytics and leave with a ranked first step.
Most small businesses often start out using Excel for their accounting and data management needs. However, this strategy is only doable up to a point.
Although the popular spreadsheet application can do a large number of tasks and is easily available worldwide. It isn’t a long-term solution. This is because while the program itself is sturdy, the spreadsheets created using it aren’t. This often leads to problems later on – which we’ll go into shortly.
Eventually, there comes a time when businesses may need to look at alternative software for their developing needs. This usually involves a move to cloud-based software.
Before we get started, let’s first establish what we mean when we talk about ‘moving to the cloud’.
‘Cloud computing’ is a general term for anything that involves delivering hosted services over the internet. ‘The cloud’ refers to servers that are hosted in data management centres all over the world and accessed over the internet, as well as the software and databases that run on those servers. By using cloud computing, users and companies don’t have to manage physical servers themselves or run software applications on their own machines – freeing up a lot of space and resources.
A ‘move to the cloud’ (also known as cloud migration) is the process of moving digital assets such as data, workloads, IT resources, or applications to cloud infrastructure. This might mean moving tools and data from old, legacy infrastructure or an ‘on-premises’ data management centre to the cloud.
Although Excel is an excellent spreadsheet application, it is just that: a spreadsheet application. Many businesses unknowingly try to use the platform for purposes other than what it was designed for or overwhelm it with data and processes it was not meant to handle. This can lead to a myriad of problems, from the small and inconvenient to the large and disastrous.
Here are just a few examples:
Excel lacks the security of a cloud-based system. Imagine the username and password of the person responsible for creating the Excel sheets (or those of a person with editing privileges) were stolen. That means the person who now has access to the sheets can do anything with the data – from deleting to stealing confidential client details.
As the size of data in a spreadsheet grows, the application’s performance plummets. When simultaneous access is added to the mix, things can come to a grinding halt – if the users can open the sheet at all. Many users run into these performance issues when they work with large amounts of data or combine lots of worksheets.
Excel also doesn’t integrate easily with other business applications, which can cause problems with data duplication or overlap.
So long as manual data entry, copy-paste techniques and formula errors are a reality, there is always a risk to the accuracy of data, and spreadsheets can be riddled with mistakes.
As people work with Excel sheets, they may make changes to the main file such as hiding columns or tabs, of which others may not be aware if changes are not communicated, leading to incorrect or incomplete reports. Another problem is that some people may prefer to work on a local version of the file in case there is an error, meaning multiple copies of the same workbook can be passed around the office, inevitably leading to a version mix-up.
Because Excel files don’t have an audit trail, it’s almost impossible to track who did what after a file has been edited a few times by multiple people. This can have a real impact on accountability and data recovery. After all, if you don’t know what was updated, by whom, and on what date how will you be able to restore the original data?
Setting up an Excel spreadsheet that meets all of your financial or data collection needs requires a lot of forethought and planning. It often takes time to set up formulas and reporting and requires manual tracking. You may find your business constantly adding or changing the information on the spreadsheet, which can be a poor use of employee time.
Creating forms to manage data input can also be time-consuming and difficult. Even when done correctly, the forms won’t have enough methods to control and validate inputs from the users, meaning there is always the chance of erroneous data capturing.
Cloud-based software is a definite step up from Excel in a number of ways. As well as being scalable, cost-effective and tailored to your business needs, it also guarantees maximum up-time and does highly secure backups on the regular, meaning you never have to think or worry about your data’s integrity.
Unlimited users are allowed, each with their own access levels so that employees only see what they need to see, and sensitive data isn’t out in the wild. Cloud storage also alleviates the pressure (and costs) of providing data storage on the premises.
Let’s look into the benefits of cloud-based software in a little more detail.
Cloud computing can scale up to support larger workloads and greater numbers of users far more easily than on-premises infrastructure. The latter option requires businesses to purchase and set up additional physical servers, networking equipment, or software licenses – all of which can be very costly (see below).
Companies often find that moving to the cloud vastly reduces the amount they spend on IT operations since their cloud providers handle maintenance and upgrades. Rather than think about keeping things running, businesses can focus more on their actual business goals and getting ahead in their chosen market.
If an application or website is hosted in cloud data management centres instead of in various on-premise servers, then data will not have to travel as far to reach the users. This enables many businesses to significantly improve service performance and the overall user experience for their customers.
Both employees and customers can access the cloud services they need from anywhere. This opens up various business opportunities such as expanding into new territories and allowing their employees to work remotely.
Cloud-based users will also be able to take advantage of other apps that sync with their existing data. This means processes like inventory management, invoicing and client data collection will become a whole lot easier, saving time and reducing costs.
Most cloud-based systems come with an easy-to-use dashboard which you don’t have to set up yourself, giving your employees confidence from the get-go. When a business has a clear financial view from the very start, it can make better strategic decisions.
All real-time financial (and other) data is kept in one central place – online, in the cloud. There’s no need to wait until the month-end to see how things are going – with just a few clicks, real-time reports and budgets are easy to view and share.
Historical data is also always available at your fingertips, and a proper audit trail ensures your data cannot be compromised.
Cloud-based software allows you to create the information any of your customers or stakeholders might need at a moment’s notice, and with more automation and less manual data entry, mistakes and errors are exceptionally rare.
It’s worth bearing in mind that Excel is highly adaptable and basically free. If your business is just starting out and your data is relatively straightforward, an Excel workbook with one administrator could be the best choice. However, even small businesses eventually tend to outgrow their spreadsheets and have to make the move to a cloud-based system.
A move to the cloud can be stressful, but it is often the best choice for organisations that require data confidentiality, access by multiple users, and ease in reporting.
Get in touch if you think there is something Bespoke could help your business with.
