Does your SME need a data warehouse?

Usually not right away. If you work with one system and a few fixed reports, a dashboard is enough. A data warehouse pays off once you need to combine figures from multiple systems and your reports take manual work or contradict each other. Below you’ll read how to decide that for your own business.

Why your reports contradict each other

Every Monday you go through the same ritual. An export from the ERP, an export from the online store, everything into Excel and, to top it off, fixing the formulas. By the time the report is ready, it’s already out of date. When two colleagues do the same calculation, they get two different answers.

That’s not because of Excel itself. It’s because every system has its own definition of a customer, an order or a period. As long as employees resolve those differences by hand, the numbers drift apart.

What a data warehouse does

A data warehouse is a central place where the data from different systems comes together, for example an ERP, online store, inventory or accounting system. The data is pulled automatically from the source systems, cleaned and linked together. A customer from the online store is the same customer there as in the ERP.

A data warehouse keeps large volumes of historical data. It knows the stock levels of every day of the past three years. Dashboards and reports use the data warehouse as their source. That way everyone looks at the same figures.

When no data warehouse is fine

Do you have one system, for example only an ERP or only an accounting package? Then you can usually connect a dashboard to it directly. Power BI or free reporting tools do that just fine.

The same goes if your questions are simple, such as revenue per month, outstanding invoices or stock per item. You don’t need a separate database for that.

When a data warehouse pays off

• You want to combine data from multiple systems, such as sales from the online store with purchasing from the ERP.
• Your reports take manual work every week, or contradict each other.
• You want to keep history that your systems don’t keep, or don’t keep long enough.
• You want to look ahead, for example at inventory planning or margin per customer over time.

Do you recognise two or more of these points? Then a data warehouse will probably deliver more than it costs.

What it delivers

• No more Excel work for your fixed reports.
• One version of the truth, because everyone looks at the same figures.
• Historical insight into inventory, margins and customers.
• Up-to-date insight, depending on how often data is synced from the source to the data warehouse.
• Steer earlier. You see a deviation while it happens.

Excel stays

You don’t have to stop using Excel. It’s still useful for your own analyses. The difference is that you no longer collect the data by hand, but pull it straight from the data warehouse.

Which tools fit an SME

It doesn’t have to be big or expensive. I build data warehouses with SQL databases, BigQuery or Databricks. Which combination fits depends on your systems and your budget. For an SME, the platform costs are often limited.

What it costs

That depends on the number of sources and reports. You get a fixed project price up front. After that you can choose fixed monthly management. How that works is on the pricing page.

How to start

Don’t start with the technology, start with your questions. Which three questions about your business can’t you answer quickly today? That’s where a good data warehouse begins.