If you deliver training as a private or enterprise RTO you know all about reporting. The ability to submit tmely and accurate  AVETMISS data is essential. But wouldn’t it be great if you could take advantage of the same data to make those critical decisions that determine how well your business is performing?

This article describes a couple of simple ideas to give you a real live window into your business. Do you need to answer questions like these? 

• Do our trainers and assessors have the capabilities and currencies to comply with SRTO 2015?
• What are the earnings from each of our courses over the past 5 years?
• What are the completion rates on all of our courses?
• Based on 5 year trend, can we get a projection of future revenue and costs?
• Do we have the resource capacity to meet future demands?
• Are students accessing our online content?

These are just some of the sorts of questions your businesses could answer if only you had a better way to see your data.

There’s no big secret, any business can have access to these vital decision making tools.

Introducing Microsoft Power BI

The dashboard in the image above was created using live data feeds rendered in real time in a Power BI dashboard. Power BI is available to everyone, you can download the desktop designer here for free. You can distribute your reports to stake holders in a number of ways.

Download Power BI Desktop here: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/desktop/

That will help you with rendering your data in glorious technicolour but how do you get hold of the data from your student management system?

The secret is live data feeds. Look for student management systems that can present your data securely in “data feeds”. Then, through its many data source options Power BI can read and present your data in whatever way you want to view and interact with it.