Excel or Power BI: which is better for a small business?

“Should we be using Power BI?” is one of the questions we hear most. The honest answer is that it depends on what you need your reports to do. Plenty of small businesses are well served by Excel. Others are spending hours every month working around problems Power BI would solve.

Here’s how we think about it.

What each one is for

Excel is a spreadsheet. It’s excellent for working things out: budgets, pricing, quick analysis, lists and one-off questions. Almost everyone in a business can open it and change it.

Power BI is Microsoft’s reporting tool. It does one job well: taking information from one or more places and turning it into reports and dashboards that update themselves and that people can click into. It isn’t a spreadsheet, and you don’t type figures into it.

The two work well together. Many Power BI reports read straight from Excel files.

When Excel is usually enough

• One or two people produce the report, and a handful of people read it.
• The figures come from one or two places.
• The workbook opens quickly and doesn’t keep breaking.
• People mainly want a monthly or weekly snapshot, rather than to explore the detail.
• You need to make changes and try “what if” scenarios.

In these cases, improving the spreadsheet you already have is often the cheaper, quicker and less disruptive option.

When Power BI starts to make sense

• Figures come from several places, such as accounts software, a CRM and a few spreadsheets, and someone joins them up by hand.
• The Excel file has become slow, huge or fragile.
• Different people need different views of the same figures, for example each manager seeing their own branch.
• People keep asking for “the same report, but for X”.
• You want reports that refresh automatically, so they’re current whenever someone opens them.
• You want to share figures securely with people outside the business, such as clients.

What about cost?

Excel comes with most Microsoft 365 business subscriptions, so for many businesses there’s no extra cost.

Power BI Desktop, the program used to build reports, is free. Sharing reports with colleagues through Microsoft’s online service normally needs a paid licence for each person who publishes or views them. There are other ways of sharing, so it’s worth checking which option suits the way you work before buying anything.

The questions we’d ask you

When a business asks us whether it needs Power BI, we usually start with:

1. Who reads the reports, and what decisions do they make with them?
2. Where do the figures come from, and how do they get into the report today?
3. How long does the report take to produce?
4. What questions do people ask that the current report can’t answer?

The answers usually make the choice clear.

The short version

• If your reports are slow to produce but the format works, start by improving the Excel process.
• If your reports are hard to use, because people can’t get at the detail or need different views, Power BI is probably worth a look.
• If both are true, fix the process first, then build Power BI on top of it.

Our pages on Power BI and improving existing reports explain what each involves, or you can tell us what you’re working with and we’ll give you a straight answer.