If it seems like data and analytics companies can’t stop talking about a “single source of truth,” well… you’re right. Single source of truth (SSOT) has emerged as a practice businesses simply can’t go without. It’s a necessity for data access, cost and productivity improvements, and reliable reporting and insights; but getting from multiple sources to one, aggregated source of truth can seem daunting.
As part of our Data Bytes video series, we sat down with Panoply General Manager Ittai Bareket, and Panoply Head of Sales Dillon Shaw about why SSOT is so important. Each video tackles a common pain point we hear from our customers, and how an SSOT can solve it.
Pain point 1: Data accessibility from any or multiple sources, at any time, for anyone on the team
This is actually our number one use case - data from multiple sources combined in one place eliminates obstacles teams run into when trying to access their company data from any or all of these sources.
Think about common data sources like Hubspot, Salesforce, or Google Analytics. All of these have the capability to pull reports natively in the platform, but the big time drain is either going to each report to find what you need, or manually combining the data into one place.
The best way to combat this is to pull from an API and make selections on what’s important, then have it automatically sync. Enter Panoply - our platform can connect to the API, normalize and ingest the data in an automatic fashion, and warehouse it so you see everything in the same central location.
Chasing data instead of having data come to you can hugely affect your team’s bandwidth. We hear all the time from customers that they’re spending too much time pulling CSVs, or putting together pivot tables in Excel. All that time spent to generate what’s really a static report (that they’ll just have to do again), since the data won’t automatically update in these tools like it will with an active API pull. A data warehouse is a huge time saver in general, and a managed one even more so.
Pain point 2: Losing trust in reports due to different numbers from disparate tools for the same metric
Not being able to trust your reports makes it nearly impossible to track and improve your company’s financial performance. With our own company as an example, the finance team at Panoply tracks ARR through a few different apps, so they need the ability to correlate data between them and track billing and customer payments. Pulling these sources into a Panoply data warehouse solves this.
Having to check multiple sources for every report, when they could be focusing on revenue-generating activity, is time-consuming for the finance team. But with an SSOT, the team can run queries on the data from a central location to get the answers they need and identify anomalies early - and early problem-solving means happier customer relationships.
Pain Point 3: the ability (or inability) to ask your data any question, any time
We talked about getting your business data from the source to the warehouse; once it’s consolidated there, what do you do? From the Panoply data warehouse, you can easily go into a BI tool like Tableau or Trevor.io, build a query, and ask it whatever you’d like. The beauty here is that it’ll continually refresh with the insights, so you don’t have to manually pull and adjust the data. You can set the query for any frequency, and even ask more questions later as you learn more about the insights.
As you might have noticed, a common theme with SSOT is time savings and productivity increases. This is the magic combination of consolidation and automation. If you can’t trust your data you can’t use it, and if you’re spending too much time trying to gather data, it feels like herding cats. When you can say goodbye to manual reports and your data is in one spot and up-to-date, look at all the time you just saved!
A single source of truth for your business data is a must-have for accurate reporting, healthy financials, and productivity.
If you’re interested in watching the Data Bytes videos, you can access them here.
How would an SSOT help your company unblock its data? Find out more with a free 60-day proof of value.
