Business Intelligence: Know What Pays, and Decide With Your Numbers

First, buy a domain name in the company’s name (your-company.ch). Then choose an email service that uses it: Infomaniak, Google, Microsoft or another. Last, set the DNS records (MX, SPF, DKIM, DMARC) so that your emails arrive and do not end up in spam.

It is the address of your website and your emails: your-company.ch. You rent it from a registrar, for one year or more. It belongs to the person or company registered as the owner: check that this is the company.

Short, easy to say on the phone, without a hyphen if possible, and close to the company name. Take the extension of your market (.ch in Switzerland), and the .com if you work abroad. Check that it is free at a registrar, then register it in the company’s name.

A .ch domain costs from a few francs to a few tens of francs a year, depending on the registrar. Look at the renewal price, not only the first-year price: it is often higher.

The owner registered with the registrar. Often an agency or a former employee bought it for you, and the company does not own it. Ask your registrar who the owner is, and have the domain put in the company’s name.

Ask your current registrar for the transfer code (authorization code), then start the transfer at the new registrar. Before that, write down your DNS settings, mainly the email ones, to avoid an outage. A change of owner is a separate step.

Yes. You rent a domain for one or more years, and you must renew it. Without renewal, it becomes free again and someone else can take it. Turn on auto-renewal with a company payment method.

With managed IT services, you hand all or part of your IT to a provider on an ongoing basis: workstations, servers, backups, security, support. Maintenance works more case by case, when something breaks. My approach sits between the two: I set up foundations in your name, documented, then IT Care checks them every month. You do not depend on me.

It depends on the number of people, the devices and the software to look after, and on what is included: support, backups, security. IT Care is priced per person and per month, with a minimum. The exact amount is on a quote, after the IT check and a thirty-minute call.

The most common: a stolen or reused password, a fake email (phishing), ransomware that encrypts your files, and a former employee who kept their access. Three measures cover the essentials: two-factor authentication, tested off-site backups, and access closed on the day someone leaves.

To log in, you need your password and a second proof: a code on your phone, an app or a physical key. A stolen password is then no longer enough. Turn it on first for email, then for the tools that hold customer or banking data.

An encrypted vault that keeps all your passwords and fills them in for you. You only remember one. It creates a different, long password for each account, and it lets the team share an access without writing it down anywhere.

A copy of your data kept somewhere other than the original, so you can get it back after a breakdown, a theft, a mistake or ransomware. It must be automatic, off-site and tested: a backup you have never restored a file from proves nothing.

Follow the 3-2-1 rule: 3 copies of your data, on 2 different media, with 1 off-site. Backups must run automatically. A backup only counts if you have already restored a file from it: test it at least once a quarter.

Keep a list of each person’s accounts. On the day they leave: close their accounts, change the shared passwords, collect their devices, and forward their mailbox to a colleague. With a password manager and a written procedure, this takes one hour.

The essentials (two-factor authentication, a password manager, tested backups) rely on tools that cost a few francs per person per month. The main cost is the set-up, done once, then a regular check.

No. No hardware, no on-site visits, no on-call service: a local provider does hardware better. I handle accounts, access, backups and software, remotely.

Business intelligence (BI) turns your company’s data into figures you read fast: who buys, what, how much, at what margin. It brings together what is spread across your CRM, your accounting and Excel, so you decide on facts. With me, it is called Insight Extraction: your best clients and your leaks.

Reading your data to answer a precise question: which clients bring in the most, which services lose money, when orders drop. You gather, clean, compare, then decide. On messy data, the analysis gives wrong figures.

A dashboard shows your key figures on one screen, up to date: revenue, margin, new clients, overdue invoices. You see in one minute where you stand, without rebuilding a spreadsheet every month.

Choose 5 to 8 figures that guide your decisions, no more. Connect them to their source (accounting, CRM) so they update themselves. Excel is enough to start; Power BI or Looker Studio help when you have more sources. The longest part is not the dashboard, but clean data behind it.

A KPI (key performance indicator) is a figure that tells you whether you are moving towards a goal: margin per client, average payment time, enquiries per month. A good KPI is measured without manual work, every month, and leads to a decision.

For a company: revenue and margin per client and per service, the share of your top 20% of clients, the cost to win a client, the value of a client over time, lost clients and overdue invoices. A few figures, tracked every month, are worth more than a 30-page report.

A CRM (customer relationship management) is the central file of your clients and prospects: contact details, exchanges, quotes, follow-ups. No information stays in an inbox or in one person’s head. Examples: HubSpot, Pipedrive, Salesforce, Twenty.

To stop losing prospects and follow-ups, and to know at any time where each client stands. A well-kept CRM is also the basis of any analysis: without a CRM, you do not know who your best clients are.

Yes: several CRMs have a free version for a few users, such as HubSpot, and Twenty is an open-source CRM you can host yourself. Paid versions are usually billed per user and per month. The real cost is elsewhere: the set-up, the import of your data and the entry rules.

The CRM manages the client relationship: prospects, sales, follow-ups. The ERP manages the company: stock, purchasing, production, accounting. Many companies need a CRM long before an ERP. What matters is that both exchange their data, with no double entry.

The website form writes straight into the CRM: each enquiry becomes a record, with the page it came from and the date, with no copy-paste. Most CRMs have a built-in form or an API; if not, a connector tool such as Make or Zapier makes the link. I set up this link in the Visible and Conquête packages.

Save the file as CSV, one column per field (name, email, phone, company), then run the CRM import, which asks you which column goes into which field. Before the import, remove duplicates and make the formats the same: otherwise, the CRM starts with the same errors as the file.

Power BI is Microsoft’s dashboard tool. The desktop version, Power BI Desktop, is free; to share reports with a team, you usually need a paid licence. It is not required: depending on your size, Excel or Looker Studio is enough.

Select your data, then Data › Remove Duplicates, and choose the columns to compare. Careful: “Müller SA” and “Muller S.A.” do not count as duplicates. In a client file, you must also make the spelling the same, then set entry rules so the duplicates do not come back.

Through your forms, quotes, invoices and CRM, with consent where the law requires it. In Switzerland, the revised Federal Act on Data Protection (FADP) has applied since 1 September 2023: say why you collect, keep only what you need and protect access. Most of the time, you already have the data: it is only spread out.

I work in your tools or on an encrypted copy hosted in Switzerland. The copy is deleted at the end, with written confirmation. A data processing agreement is signed before the first file.

It depends on the number of sources, the number of records and the state of the data. A few weeks for clean accounting and a clean CRM; cleaning a ten-year history can take up to two months. The duration is written in the offer.