RiOS vs BI

A BI tool such as Power BI is a toolkit: it connects sources and shows whatever you build in it, but it comes out of the box empty and does not tell you what to look at. RiOS is a revenue intelligence platform with the revenue definitions, leakage checks and follow-up already built in: it puts CRM, billing, support and advertising data side by side, puts a euro amount on what is leaking and proposes a fix. BI answers the questions you ask. RiOS asks the questions about revenue leakage for you, and keeps asking them.

What is a BI tool?

Power BI, Tableau, Looker, or a well-built Excel model on a data warehouse: BI is the layer in which you bring together data from different sources and turn it into charts, tables and reports. It is flexible. You can answer almost any question with it, provided the data is there and someone builds the report.

That flexibility has a price. Before a BI environment delivers anything, someone has to:

1. decide which questions matter;
2. connect the sources and clean the data;
3. set definitions: what is revenue, what is an active customer, when is a deal won;
4. build the reports;
5. maintain them when a source changes.

For a company with a data team, that is normal work. For a company of EUR 5M to EUR 30M without an analyst, it often means: an outside party builds a dashboard, it works for a year, and after that nobody changes it any more.

What is RiOS?

RiOS is a platform, currently in beta, that connects to the systems you already have and has one job: finding and closing revenue leakage. The difference from BI is not in the charts, but in what is built in beforehand and what happens after the chart. The platform includes, among other things:

• Dashboards that are ready to use: leaks, forecast, pipeline and score on one screen.
• Signals and AI recommendations: every signal with the data behind it, a level of certainty, an amount and a proposed fix.
• AI monitoring on every connected metric, so a deviation is flagged instead of someone having to notice it.
• Automations and AI agents that carry out a fix in your own systems, after approval.
• Task management: a finding becomes a task with an owner, a status and the euro amount attached.

A BI tool has none of these as standard. You can build them, but then you are in effect building your own platform.

Side by side

Where BI is stronger

To be fair: for many questions BI is the better choice.

• Breadth. Inventory, production, HR, purchasing, cash flow: BI can do all of it. RiOS focuses on revenue.
• Your own analyses. If you want to investigate a specific question nobody has asked before, a flexible toolkit is useful.
• Existing investment. If you have a working data warehouse and a team that maintains it, you do not want to duplicate it.

So RiOS is not a replacement for your BI environment. It is a specialist layer for one subject where BI in practice often falls short.

Where BI falls short on revenue leakage

Revenue leakage is a hard subject for BI, for three reasons.

Leaks sit between systems. A deal without an invoice, a contract with indexation that is not on the invoice, a customer with a growing support queue and a renewal in three months. To see these, you have to link systems at record level. Many BI models link at the level of totals or periods. You then see that the lines do not match, but not which customer causes the difference.

Leaks need an expectation. To see that a customer pays too little, you need to know what they should have paid. That expectation comes from contracts, pricing agreements and historical behaviour. BI shows actual values. Someone has to build the expected value in first.

Leaks need follow-up. A BI report with twenty discrepancies is a start. Who calls the customer? Who raises the invoice? Who checks that it has been resolved? BI has no answer to that. More on that difference: Revenue Intelligence vs dashboards.

Worked example: build or use

Worked example: suppose you want to build five revenue checks in Power BI. Won deals without an invoice, invoice amount lower than deal value, contracts without indexation, customers with falling volumes, and payers who pay later and later.

What you need, as an indication of the order of magnitude:

• connections to CRM and the accounts, with a customer and deal key that is the same in both systems;
• a contract table with term, pricing agreements and indexation clause, which often does not yet exist;
• five exception reports, tested against reality;
• someone who checks every month that the connections are still running and the reports are still right.

For an experienced BI developer that is a project of several weeks, plus ongoing maintenance. What it costs depends on who builds it and how clean your data is; there is no reliable standard figure. The point is the trade-off: do you build and maintain this yourself, or use a platform where these checks are already in place? For a company with its own data team, building it yourself can be logical. For a company without one, usually not. More on that trade-off, specifically for Power BI users: do I need Revenue Intelligence if I already have Power BI?.

How RiOS and BI work alongside each other

In a company that uses both, the division of work is clear:

• BI remains the place for broad management information and your own analyses.
• RiOS monitors the revenue chain, flags leaks and makes sure they are followed up.
• The sources stay the same: CRM, accounts, ERP. RiOS reads them and replaces none of them.

If you have a data warehouse, the question is which layer does what. That comparison is in Revenue Intelligence vs data warehouse. And if you want to know what a one-off audit adds to a BI environment, read revenue audit vs business intelligence.

Checklist: do you need something alongside BI?

Go through these questions with whoever manages your BI:

1. Can you see, per won deal, whether it has been invoiced in full, not only in total?
2. Is contract information, such as term, indexation and minimum commitment, in your data model?
3. Is there a report that shows discrepancies rather than totals, and does someone look at it weekly?
4. Does a discrepancy that is found become a task with an owner somewhere?
5. Do you know within a week when an integration between two systems stops running?
6. Can someone other than the builder change the reports?

With four or more answers of "yes", your BI environment probably covers revenue control well. With two or fewer, there is a gap that BI will not close by itself. The broad comparison between Revenue Intelligence and BI, apart from RiOS, is in the pillar Revenue Intelligence vs Business Intelligence. The RiOS modules are shown screen by screen on the page about the system.

Frequently asked questions

Can RiOS replace my Power BI?

For revenue control, it can take over the work you would otherwise build in BI. For broad management information on inventory, production or HR, no. Most companies keep both.

Does RiOS read from my data warehouse or from the source systems?

RiOS connects to the systems you already use, such as CRM, billing, support and advertising platforms. Whether a data warehouse can serve as a source is something to raise at intake.

Why is RiOS priced per company and not per user?

Revenue leakage affects sales, finance, operations and leadership. A price per user puts a brake on who is allowed to look. RiOS therefore charges per company, however many people log in.

Do I need an analyst for RiOS?

The starting point is no: the dashboards and checks are built in. Someone does have to follow up findings. That is not analyst work, but the work of the owner of the process where the leak occurs.