We're used to think about BI in terms of business use only.
But BI is applicable at home too.
If we have the tool to analyze any sort of data, why not use it at home?
Here's an example: Most credit card companies let you download your personal spending data in Excel format. I put all these Excel files into one big file, and connected to it with Prism. Then I created a dashboard that shows me the important things I want to know when I go over my expenses:
The beautiful thing about dashboards is that they're dynamic. I can change the year in the combo box or select different months on the chart, and all the widgets update accordingly. Here's a short explanation on the various widgets I created and what they show me:
- 'Businesses I paid the most to' - This pivot table shows me the businesses I paid the most to altogether, and in how many transactions.
- 'Most expensive single transactions' - Unlike the previous Pivot, this one only takes single transactions into consideration.
- Monthly gas expenses - This chart shows me my monthly expenses on fuel. I can also see my average yearly expenses on gas below the chart.
To create this chart I created a 'Filter by Label' that filtered out only businesses with names of gas companies.
- Yearly analysis - whenever I choose a different year, I can see my average monthly expenses for that year, and the average number of transactions I do with my credit card.
- Spending or Saving? Whenever I choose a different month on the main chart, I get a green light if I'm saving, a red light if I'm spending, or a yellow light if I'm neutral. How do I decide? The traffic light widget uses a measure I created, that compares the selected month's expenses to the average expenses of the last 12 months (relative to the selected month). If I spent over 20% above the average, then I'm spending, if over 20% below, then I'm saving, and if my spendings are in-between the +/- 20% range, then I'm neutral. This traffic light gives me a quick indication on my spending during that month.
Getting this kind of information is practically impossible by going over our records 'manually' the way we're used to. With Prism I can get answers to complex questions over different time periods in seconds. So once a month, I connect to my credit card's web site and download this month's Excel file, append it to my big file, and analyze the data in Prism.
Analyzing personal expenses has never been easier.
