Area 14 · Data, AI and advisory

Data and analytics

It is the start of the month at a wholesale business in the Innviertel region. The chief accountant pulls a sales export from the merchandise system, fetches the Amazon payout statement, deducts fees and postage manually and mails a workbook to the owner. The sales department has meanwhile produced its own list, with another bottom line. That routine burns several days of work every month and creates two competing truths. We aim to leave you with one: tidy master records, all sources collected centrally, and dashboards that update themselves overnight.

Send an enquiry View services

offerings under this heading

1 turnover figure

that sales, finance and directors all accept

€110

hourly plus VAT, or fixed once your data has been assessed

hosting in Austria or elsewhere in the Union

Clean records, one warehouse, less typing

You may order these separately, yet the sequence counts. A warehouse built on uncleaned master data simply reproduces familiar mistakes with better graphics. Document capture can proceed in parallel, tackling the paperwork that keeps arriving with every lorry.

Send an enquiry

Master data management

A single record per customer, vendor and article, complete with a correct VAT ID and address. Duplicates are identified, merged after your sign-off, and protected against by input rules your ERP applies automatically. E-invoicing makes this pay off quickly.

Data warehouse

Nightly loads bring BMD, Business Central or Odoo, the Shopware storefront, marketplace payouts and Google Ads costs together in a central database hosted in the EU. Power BI or Metabase then presents figures that reconcile with the ledger.

Intelligent document processing

Goods-received slips, bills from overseas vendors, CMR waybills and agreements still being keyed in by hand. Software extracts the content, translates supplier codes into your article numbers and parks every document for human approval.

Symptoms of neglected data

Few clients arrive asking for data cleansing. They want a dashboard, and as soon as the underlying systems are opened, some of the following turn up. Spot two or more in your own business and the reporting software is not to blame.

Meetings start by disputing the totals

Definitions get written down. Sales goes by order date, finance by invoice date, and credit notes are subtracted differently by every team.

One client, several records

Records are merged and rules enforced. “Tischlerei Huber”, “TISCHLEREI HUBER GMBH” and an entry lacking a VAT ID show up in reports as three distinct accounts.

Closing the books takes a week

Loading gets automated. Copying exports into spreadsheets and matching them up occupies your most knowledgeable finance person just when she is needed elsewhere.

Inventory figures lag behind reality

Refresh cycles are adjusted. Once bestsellers run out quicker than reports arrive, buyers are ordering on guesswork.

Paper slips are copied by hand

Automatic extraction takes over. Positions from Italian or Chinese vendors are still entered into the ERP line after line.

Marketplace profitability is a mystery

Real margins per channel are calculated. Amazon, Kaufland.at and the own web shop get ranked by gross sales rather than by what remains after fees and returns.

Handsome visuals on flawed data do more harm than a clumsy workbook. Someone building a sheet manually at least sees individual rows and occasionally catches an absurd value. A slick dashboard radiates authority, so nobody challenges it, even while duplicate records overstate active customers by twenty per cent. We therefore quantify data quality first and present the error tally without cosmetics.

Replacing the manual spreadsheet step by step

The starting point is a narrow topic, typically sales or stock levels, with only a few key figures. Further subjects follow when that first report has become a daily habit. Everything happens through protected remote connections and online meetings.

Agreed vocabulary

Finance and sales sign off on how turnover, gross margin, returns and an “active” customer are computed. Without that agreement, the first report is torn to pieces at its first outing.

Source inventory

ERP, online store, marketplaces, advertising platforms and those unofficial workbooks. Every source gets an owner, an access method and a note on which personal fields must appear in your processing register.

Parallel run

During a few weeks, automated and manual versions coexist. Directors retire the handmade sheet only once each discrepancy has an explanation.

Expansion on the same base

Additional topics plug into the existing model and loading jobs, so every new report is considerably cheaper than the pilot one.

Frequently asked questions

Businesses already on Microsoft 365 with Entra ID usually get on well with Power BI, since permissions reuse existing identities and Excel sits right next to it. Metabase, self-hosted, suits teams who are comfortable with direct PostgreSQL queries and dislike per-seat licensing. Either can sit on the same warehouse. We compare lifetime costs of both before you commit.

Not if it is done properly. Extraction happens at night or in small increments, ideally via the vendor's interface or a database replica, and never as heavy queries during office hours. A separate warehouse exists precisely for this reason: dashboards query their own copy, so colleagues invoicing in BMD are unaffected.

It lives in an account held by your company, say at Exoscale, Hetzner, IONOS or within an EU region of Azure or AWS, or on hardware you run yourself. A data processing agreement governs what we do. Visibility follows roles, so directors see the complete picture while each field rep sees only their patch. Every access is logged, which simplifies any query from your data protection officer.

Chiefly it hinges on master data quality. Fairly tidy records mean an early first report, with most effort going into agreeing terms. Thousands of duplicates turn the clean-up into the main job. That is why we name dates only after inspecting your systems. Pricing is fixed, or €110 hourly plus VAT with a maximum number of hours agreed in advance.

KMU.DIGITAL, aws programmes and grants from individual federal states have supported digitalisation in the past. Eligibility and current conditions need checking directly with the relevant body or through the Austrian Economic Chamber (WKO). We are glad to supply a description of the planned work, but approval is never something we can guarantee, and our prices stand regardless of any subsidy.

Related areas

All services

Area 13 Artificial intelligence Putting trustworthy data to further use Area 10 E-commerce and integrations Web orders flowing into the ERP untouched Area 15 IT advisory and audit Choosing metrics that genuinely guide management Solution GDPR compliance Keeping personal data in check within dashboards

Time to sort out your numbers

Let us know which reports are still assembled manually and where totals disagree. After reviewing your sources we will recommend the most sensible first step.

Email
office@apply.at

Availability
Monday to Friday, 8:00-17:00 Austrian time (CET/CEST), reply within one working day

Meetings
By video on Microsoft Teams or Google Meet

By ticking this box I allow Apply to process my details for the purpose of answering this request (see our privacy notice for details)