Chuck Coxhead:

Hey everybody, this is Chuck for the Turnkey 365 Podcast. I am thrilled to have with me Anthony Bonaduce from Cosmos Today. They have got a new product, but an amazing product. It's the kind of thing that is kind of just blowing everybody's doors off, 30 reports in 30 minutes. Folks, if you're in the a r P world, that is not the kind of thing you're used to hearing in 30 reports in 30 minutes. I've even heard 'em say they can run reports 48 times faster than Excel. Boy, if we were in different companies, somebody might, uh, you know, call something or other, but I don't think that's the case. I've seen it and I want to hear more about it and show you. Anthony, welcome, welcome, welcome.

 

Anthony Bonaduce:

Thank you, Chuck. Thank you. Honestly, I'm, uh, super excited to be here. I mean, as I've told you, I've watched your podcast, your snippets on social media. I mean, you are definitely the highest quality production podcast I've seen in the channel, at least, uh, you know, um, as, as far as I'm concerned. So I think it's fantastic, and I've been excited to, to hopefully get to be on here with you. So thanks for having us.

 

Chuck Coxhead:

Well, thank you. I'm blushing. But most, what's most important is that we're gonna be able to teach some, some people new stuff. That is what I'm really after. We can help them to really understand, you know, that e r P is not this great big scary monster that you can realize real benefits, and that's really what I'm after, and I think that's what we can get with Cosmos. I really do. So, let's talk about what people are living now. All right, let's talk about the before and after. How are folks creating reports now? You know, say for month end close.

 

Anthony Bonaduce:

Yeah, it's, it's actually unbelievable. I mean, I've been doing this for a very long time. Our founding team has been doing nothing but helping folks with reporting analytics and data management for, you know, 35 plus years, right? And I mean, you'll see companies of all shapes and sizes, and I'm not saying every company falls into this bucket, but I think in Microsoft, uh, you know, in our space we see so often the month end close process is just the most manual, you know, convoluted, just repetitive, you know, I call it kind of the, the copy and waste type process, right? Like, you know, go in, go into your e r p, run an account schedule, dump out the account schedule, run it for each company, dump it into Excel, take all of those, consolidate together, copy, paste all this stuff, and, you know, when next week's is due or next month's or whatever, next quarter, it's just the same painful process.

(02:23):

I mean, we hear stuff all the time. I spend a week doing this, right? Every time we have to do it. I spend 40 hours, whatever. Um, and I'm not saying every customer feels that or, or does the same thing, but the reality is it's typically not efficient, right? Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, uh, you know, you've either got some combination of, like I said, account schedules, you've got reports, maybe your partners have built in, um, you know, your E R P directly, you know, you're, again, just dumping stuff into Excel. I mean, it's, it's a bit of a, um, a manual process and I don't know why companies of all shapes and sizes will limp through it. Um, and it's such a better way to do it, right?

 

Chuck Coxhead:

Yeah. And you know, it's funny, we're recording this, uh, uh, now it's February 2nd. Ha ha. Happy Groundhog Day, everybody.

 

Anthony Bonaduce:

Absolutely.

 

Chuck Coxhead:

We're just coming out of that period in January that we hear when we talk to CFOs and we talk to accountants, we talk to the financial folks, uh, you know what, don't talk to me in January. I've gotta do year end close, and I've gotta get my 10 90 nines, and I've get my o w two S out, and I, I just come back to me in February. Sometimes it's say, come back to me in March. I have to prepare for audit. I have all these things that I have to do. This is that time of year. And clearly that rings true, certainly in a reporting aspect, but of course, there's a whole lot more to it than just getting the reports out. But clearly that rings true. This is the time of year when they need to save as much time as possible. Uh, ain't no doubt. So tell me, how did this all come about? I mean, I've got a little video to run in the background while you tell everybody, but tell me about the genesis of Cosmos.

 

Anthony Bonaduce:

Yeah, so good question. So we've been, like I said, in this space for 35 years, and in our, you know, past life, we worked at a large reporting analytics company that was focused on Microsoft Nav, um, and GP to some regard, but mostly Microsoft Nav. And, you know, what ended up happening is, is me and actually one of my other founders left that company, went to work at a partner, uh, and built out an analytics reporting practice. It was a couple million dollar a year practice that we grew because of the demand for those types of solutions. But even when we were implementing, you know, 3, 4, 5 different tools, there was just so many, um, kind of things you'd see and go, why has no one fixed this? Right? Uh, the most basic example is, you know, you've got a cloud, e r p in business, central cloud.

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That's where Microsoft's pushing, that's where the momentum is going. That's what everyone's moving to, and there's no solution built for it. There's no cloud reporting tool, no cloud analytics solution. Um, the company I worked for previously, right? Everything was on prem. And so it, it would, it would muddy the message to partners to, uh, that partners would say, I should say, uh, to their customers to say, Hey, go cloud, embrace cloud. But also you're still need some sort of server to run all your reports and your reporting tools. I mean, it just didn't laminate. And so that was one that was staring us in the face and, you know, we just kind of said, Hey, there's a better way to do this, um, and we can align more closely with partners and with Microsoft and with, you know, customer demand for cloud. So that's kinda where Cosmos came to be.

 

Chuck Coxhead:

Very cool. Very cool. So that's how you came to be, and you're talking about essentially you've got a better way. There's no doubt about it. Uh, I've seen it. And tell me about it. Let's tell the folks how is it that Cosmos is solving the problem in a better way?

Anthony Bonaduce (05:34):

Yeah, I mean, I think there's so many aspects to this. In fact, I knew you would probably ask something like this, and I found myself driving the other day and just kind of thinking in my head about it, right? Because, um, I could sit here and talk about technology. I could tell you we have a better mouse trap, which we do, right? But everyone says that on the other hand though, I think. Yeah, exactly. And, and I think on the other hand, you know, one of the, that bothers me, that has become so diluted in our space is another big demand lever for what we're doing, was getting back to a level of customer service support, responsiveness that is missing with a lot of the tools, at least we worked with. And so, you know, when we built this company, our dna, our core values was to have a fantastic product that's obvious.

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And if we can't build that after 35 years of experience and, you know, building what people ask for and incorporating what the partners want, then that's a failure on us. We knew we could get that one right. The thing we really wanted to stress as well was just taking care of people, right? I'm sure you've felt it, obviously with your team from us, but you know, anyone that's worked with myself or Brian Peterson or you know, the other folks that have, you know, founded Cosmos, you know, that like, we're those weird people that respond to your email within minutes that pick up your phone call every time you call, right? And same thing with our customers. I mean, um, you look at our case studies, you look at reviews, it's not uncommon to hear the, you know, we've never seen this level, level of support ever.

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You know, and that's, that's the thing that everyone claims. They have great support proofs in the pudding on that. But, you know, our reputation around that is starting to spread. So, you know, I would say it's the support and service we provide. It's the, you know, easy to work with vibe we want to give off. And then obviously a fantastic solution. I mean, the solution is cutting edge technology. It's all laminated with Microsoft. It's modern, it's lightning fast. That was another huge pain point in the channel was, you know, on-prem tools, trying to report against cloud data sources. When you have to pass that data back and forth across the web, it's slow, right? It's inherently slow. And so we wanted to make sure we're up in the cloud talking to cloud. So that performance is super snappy, you know, and that it just solves the challenges modern workplaces are facing, right?

 

Chuck Coxhead:

That's awesome. And, and, and really that's what it's about. I mean, the E E R P world is I'm facing this big daunting project and mm-hmm. <affirmative>, it's, let's face it, it's, it's something that if they could avoid it, they would avoid it, right? It's a massive investment. It's massive to upkeep, but when you get into it, if the user experience isn't fantastic, if, if the, if you aren't able to save time in what you're doing and generate that additional roi, then honestly it just comes back to bite you and everybody just grumbles, right? So that experience has to be amazing. And I love when folks bring a tool that can take what is an amazing platform that really is almost a blank canvas in a lot of ways. In this case, Microsoft Business Central, you can bring that extra wow factor, that extra incredible user experience and say, clearly there's improved ri and that I can get my reporting done a lot faster, which frees them up to do other more, you know, value valuable tasks.

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So, um, so there's a couple of things. You know, we talked about in prep, uh, we talked about, uh, some of the things that when the folks are doing this, what they have to give up, what they have to stop. Um, so they have to, when they run those reports and say another reporting solution, okay, they're, they have to stop so they can do any number of things like proofreading. Okay? So what does that look like? What do they, you know, you're talking about this running in the crowd in the cloud, you're talking about running independently. What do they normally doing when that, in that painful reporting process that takes up all that charge?

 

Anthony Bonaduce:

Yeah. And I you saying spec specific to when reports are running and updating and things like that? Yep, yep. Yeah, I mean, I think one of the big challenges we wanted to solve, right? And we saw this a lot in our past life when we worked, like I said, with a different reporting and analytics platform, was, um, Excel based reporting tools almost exclusively run inside of Excel. Makes sense, right? Sure. You're building the report in Excel, you're running the report in Excel. Well, the problem with that is, as, as I mentioned, performance comes crashing down when you're using these, you know, on-premise tools against cloud data sources, will those Excel tools tie up Excel? So now you're telling a finance and accounting person, right? Um, yeah, I know your report takes 40 minutes to run in this other product, so just don't use Excel for 40 minutes.

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And they're like, that's what I use all day long <laugh>. That is my platform for success, right? And so, you know, we, we designed things, um, to run outside of Excel. So the, the input, uh, you know, you create it in Excel, it runs in an engine in the cloud, the output goes back into Excel. But that means that they can run one report, 50 reports. It's not occupying Excel. And also most of those tools, um, that, that you mentioned, I mean, you can't run the next report until the first report finishes. It just gets batched up. And so, you know, it might be this report's gonna keep you attic cell for 30 minutes. This report's gonna keep you out for 45 minutes. This one's gonna keep you out for 15 minutes cuz you need to run three reports. The, again, because we built this engine from the ground up, because it's in the cloud, the, the resources can scale up and down based on the needs the customers, you know, querying the system for. And so you can run 10 reports at the same time. Not only are they gonna run faster, they're not gonna tie up Excel, but, you know, report one doesn't have to finish before report two starts. They're all running concurrently. And so we just give users, um, you know, a lot more flexible access without locking them out of systems and just letting them do their job, right. Spend less time waiting on reports, more time analyzing data, being strategic, you know, so on and so forth.

 

Chuck Coxhead:

Yeah. And I mean, if, think about the workers, okay, so Excel's tied up, I'll go get coffee, I'll go socialize. Those are all fine things to do, but you don't wanna have to be forced to. It's, you know, at, at these, you know, throughout the day, at some point, you know, you feel like you gotta get work done and you're just like, God, I wish I was getting work done. I really, I want to go home today. And so Yep. You know, that I, I imagine that's the frustration that the folks are experiencing. I know if any one of my tools was locked up for some period of time running in parallel, I'd probably be insane about it. <laugh>, but, you know. Yeah,

 

Anthony Bonaduce:

Absolutely. Absolutely.

 

Chuck Coxhead:

So we talked about, you know, we talked about speed, um, and, you know, how much faster can it be? I mean,

 

Anthony Bonaduce:

Really, yeah. So our, our big claim to fame, right? What lit our hair on fire, and we've got, you know, data to support all this, but we did some benchmarking against other, you know, common names. You're gonna hear when you're looking for reporting and analytics tools, um, that are Excel based in the Microsoft space. Um, and on average we saw a 48 times improvement on performance. So, you know, a report would run in 36 minutes and one of the other tools and it would take 16 seconds in Cosmos, right? And so, I mean, that's a substantial amount of time and that's, that's the average, right? So when we talk about, um, larger reports, you know, multi paginated reports, things like that, I mean, we saw 102 times faster stuff like that. I mean, those types of data points, I mean, we, we'll tell people that on a call, we'll say 48 times faster, we'll show the slide and they'll go, oh, 4.8 times faster, <laugh> 48 times faster, right? And so, um, that's what really, I think when we sent that message out through the, the channel partners started going, oh, what is this? Like, let's take a look at this. Right? And so that's kind of, that's kind of what led our hair on fire.

 

Chuck Coxhead:

Yeah. And Cosmos is a relatively new company, so, you know, new companies come outta the shoot and they can make these claims and, and you know, you don't really have anything to back it up. Turnkey technologies in Missouri, that's the show me state. We definitely want to see it. And you have shared with me a case study where you actually have, you actually have the proof. And, and I love this. I, I, I just, I love the quote here. Um, it's like punching the easy button. I mean, we all know what the easy button is. We all know who popularize the easy button. You're not allowed to use the easy button, but your customers are certainly allowed to say it. And it certainly delivers, you know, volumes of feelings about early success stories. How, how long has Cosmos been around?

 

Anthony Bonaduce:

So Cosmos, we launched the product commercially, I wanna say it was around June or April of last year. So it was, you know, we, we made our formal announcement at directions, launched it, launched it commercially, but, um, product's been around for a little over a year. Um, gosh, oh my gosh, it's February. So actually, yeah, little bit over a year. Um, time is flying, which is crazy. Um, seems like it goes faster every year, but yeah, it's been around a little over a year. Um, and I always just kind of joke, right? New product, old dogs, right? It's, it's, it's at the end of the day, um, the product's gonna get older as time passes. Our experience and knowledge has been there for, like I said, long, long time. And it's been so fun to do something new, something the market's been waiting for. So,

 

Chuck Coxhead:

Well, when I read this case study, when I listen to the, what you're talking about in terms of service, in terms of having the data to back it up and mm-hmm. <affirmative> this, all this information, it sounds like a mature company though. I mean, but clearly there's mature in age and then there's mature in your product and your capabilities and the way you conduct yourself. And clearly, uh, for such a young company, you're coming outta the shoot like a champion racehorse. And that's, that's pretty amazing. So the proofs in the pudding on case studies, I mean, I'm an ROI guy, uh, you know, how long does it take to pay for itself?

 

Anthony Bonaduce:

Got it. I mean, I, if you think about the stories we talked about around people spending a week, a month, right? Doing these, these closing processes, I mean, that right there is gonna pay for itself. If you think about the cost, I mean, honestly, I don't, this is one I could go on for way too long. We don't have time to to dig into all this, but like a couple couple examples, right? When I was on the partner side, there were multiple occasions where for a single Power BI dashboard or report, we build the customer 40 hours at about two 50 an hour, $10,000 report. It's more than the entire product costs by a lot, right? So you see those examples all the time. I've had partners bring us, you know, an opportunity with one of their customers and kind of tell the customer like, I know you needed this, so we had to do it, but you know, just a heads up, we spent 80 hours on this, you know, these two reports they needed or this one report, right?

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I mean, it is so easy to justify because again, it's it's self-service reporting. You buy a platform, you invest a little bit of time, the training's free, you don't even have to worry about that, right? But you, you get in there and you just start creating reports. And you know, again, I'm sure, we'll, we'll talk about this at some point, but one of the things people love is that it's not a blank canvas. There's pre-built data models behind the scene. There's 30 reports, you're up and running with them very, very quickly. I'm sure we'll talk about that. But, you know, that's, that's the beauty of it. It's, it's so simple to justify, you know, to justify it. And if you want to go broad strokes, there was a study published by Harvard Business Review recently that said, companies that embrace a data-driven culture experience of four times improvement in revenue and customer and better customer satisfaction. I mean, what else do you need to hear?

 

Chuck Coxhead:

Uh, not much. Not much. Yeah. Yeah. And on the one hand, I love the blank canvas because so often we get a solution and it's limited by its functionality, and yep. We get, we get boxed in the minute we want to, you know, functional, like a mature organization, like we discussed about Cosmos a minute ago. We are locked in because of limitations of our technology. A blank canvas application allows for that future expansion, and you don't have to do it all at once. But by the same token, a blank canvas requires that upfront investment in time, potentially capital indefinitely resources. So you going into that, you know, structured solution will certainly get you up and running more quickly. And as I said, it's not just roi, it's, I mean, as important as that is, to me, it's really time to value. I could get all my return investment, it can take me 25 years.

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I say that all the time, and that's just not gonna make your stakeholders very happy. They wanna see their time to value, they wanna know that this thing is paid for, and now we're already have people out doing more valuable things at this point. So that's the, the benefits of that, you know, data structure that structured app are, are really, i, I love them, especially when it's built on top of essentially what is a blank canvas platform. Yes. Which makes it even better. And, and that really leads me to, you know, my kind of my next question we talked about in prep, but tell me about some of the other advantages of Cosmos.

 

Anthony Bonaduce:

Yeah, so I mean, I think there's a lot of different directions you can go on this question. I mean, one is, like you talked about advantages, time savings, productivity increase, you know, but there's also those intangibles, right? Like, what do you want data for? People in theory should want data to not just see what happened, but also look forward. What are, what are, where are their opportunities for the business? What's selling? Should we invest somewhere else? You know, do, do we have the ability to expand? Should we expand? Where should we expand? You know, all those different things. So being able to make actual data-driven decisions is a massive benefit. But if we think about more kind of granular just for our space and Microsoft, I mean, some of the benefits there, it's cloud, right? It lets you move toward that cloud first approach that so many organizations want to get to and haven't had the means to do, right?

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Um, you know, we talked about this, right? It's performant, right? It's the ability to just do your job, less time building reports, more time analyzing data, right? I mean, there's so many different things, and I'm sure again, we'll talk about it. But, you know, cosmos isn't just financial operational reports in Excel, it's dashboards, it's analytics, it's the ability to analyze large volumes of data, spot trends at a glance, all those things that matter. And so, you know, to me, you can tell by the way I talk about it, it's an area I'm passionate about. It's an area I choose to work in. The reason I do is because you see quotes like that, it's like pushing the easy button. These are tools that make a massive impact at a business. No one buys a reporting tool and says like, eh, that was all right, <laugh>. It's usually like, oh my God, I can't believe we used to do it the other way.

 

Chuck Coxhead:

Yeah. You know? Sure. Yeah. Especially when they're coming from, you know, when we talk about, when we talk to customers, they're coming from, um, sometimes they're not doing reporting tools, they're hamstrung and they may be in multiple locations and they have to consolidate manually outside the system, running Excel and all of these different things. And of course, this is the benefit of going to a truly cloud E R P where you can do this, take care of all of your locations, even your multiple entities, and then consolidate under one. And that's, you know, clearly the benefits and you're now not going outside the system once again. Now you have time that you can use spent on higher value activities for your customers, employees, and stakeholders, which I always love. So tell me more. Tell me more about those advantages specifically. So,

 

Anthony Bonaduce:

Yeah, I mean, again, can dig into this. I mean, I'm, I got all day, Chuck, so you'll be careful what you ask for here. Cause I can sit here and talk about this all day. But, um, but no, I mean, I think, you know, productivity in the reporting space is so bizarre because people will limp by, I mean, you think about e R p, there's a lot of partners that will tell you people aren't buying e r P for E R P, they're buying E R P because it's a data repository and they need to get the data out, right? Like folks either get it or don't. But what I've always said is, like E R P reporting is a checkbox. If you think about, I've worked with a lot of ERPs, I'm sure you have as well. If you think about EER P reporting, they're not gonna sell that thing if they say it does no reporting.

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So they all have some capacity of reporting, but it's not what business users want. They're not gonna go in and write SQL code to create reports, right? And they're just not gonna do that. And so, you know, I often wonder, you know, when we think about the benefits of these tools, like, do people even know they exist? Because to your point, there are people doing it manually, doing it just the most difficult way possible. And you're almost like, I mean, do they know there's a better way to do this? Right? But yeah, anyways, reporting's just one of those things that pays for itself. It's, it's, we've talked about all the reasons why, and there's better ways to do it. It's just, it, it blows my mind that, you know, I've seen large businesses, we worked in my past life with some really large companies that were still just limping by on reporting. I mean, it was like, we have eight people just cobble together manual reports with Cosmos. You don't have to do any of that. I mean, I think Dave, uh, from the case study said it, well, push the easy button. These reports are refreshable, you build them once, format 'em, get 'em looking how you want, push the run button and let the data update in seconds. And there's your month end close.

 

Chuck Coxhead:

Yep. So, you know, we're talking about other solutions we're talking about. They don't even know that there's a, that, that this is a possibility. What is the, so what is the platform on which this is built, right? So this is specifically for,

 

Anthony Bonaduce:

Uh, the, the product itself, as far as who it, it's built for Business Central. So business Business central trial users. Yep. That's, that's the plan right now. Now one of our initiatives this year will be rolling this out for additional data sets. Um, we wanna give users the ability to either use it independently with a different data source or to take data and consolidate it into our data warehouse or data mart behind the scenes. Um, that will give folks, you know, that true holistic view of their business. But right now, we launched this thing specifically for Business Central Cloud. I mean, I don't shy away from that. That was a strategic decision that was based on market feedback, based on what the partners asked for, what users were asking for. And the reason that's so important is because anytime you're built specifically for something, you're going to have more, you know, synergy. You're more laminated with that solution. I mean, you log into Cosmos with the same credentials you log into Business Central with, and your other Microsoft applications, just one less set of things to think about, have to store passwords. It's integrated with Microsoft, right? And Microsoft has taken very kindly to it. I mean, we're receiving a, a good chunk of funding towards our development every year from Microsoft now, which is fantastic.

 

Chuck Coxhead:

Well, that's amazing. So, so that integration, you're talking about single sign on, how else is it integrated into bc? Yeah,

 

Anthony Bonaduce:

I mean, um, so we're, again, I think, I can't remember if we're gonna talk about this or not, but I might give away a little bit here. Um, you know, one of the things when you're built specifically for a system like Business Central is it means you understand the tables, the fields, the structure, the things people care about. And so it's allowed us, um, to have pre-built content on the back end of our product and the front end of our product. And I'll talk about what those mean. So backend is gonna be the data management aspect, right? Taking the data from the e r p, you know, putting it through a data cleansing process, um, you know, distilling it down into only the data that users actually care about for reporting. And so because we know how people use BC and how they used its predecessor Microsoft Nav, we're able to build this pre-built structure.

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We know 99% of what they want for sales in finance and inventory and AP and ar. And so, like we talked about earlier, that just comes out of the box. Of course, it can be customized, like you said, it's, it's a pre-built templatized solution with a blank canvas when it comes to customization. We can access any table, field, i s v tables, whatever, um, from the, the customer's BC instance, but we give so much of that pre-built because we're built for Business Central Cloud on the front end of the product. That's gonna be your reports, your dashboards, things like that. And we have dozens of dashboards and reports that just come out of the box. Every tool has some pre-built reports and dashboards, but if you're built agnostic, or you're built for, you know, NAB and not Business Central, tho those don't work. You run 'em against bc they don't work, you know, they were, they were hard coded with different, you know, accounts, schedules or with, um, you know, different company names or different, uh, tables and fields that don't exist in the new E R P, whatever. So we know, because we're designed for it and we validated all this, every single one of those pre-built report templates works for a customer on day one immediately. No other tool in the space can say that.

 

Chuck Coxhead:

That's integration for sure. And that's data integration. So what is the user experience like? I mean, we're talking some of these fully integrated in BC from the user perspective, right? You're not leaving BC per se to go out and use another app?

 

Anthony Bonaduce:

Yep. Yeah. Well, there is, so, uh, that's an interesting distinction I wanna pause on too, because yes and no on that. So you can put Cosmos data into bc so you can literally see like through our Power BI integration, I'm sure we'll talk about it, but you can see, oh, we are Power BI Reports, dashboards, all that good stuff in Business Central, in teams in CR R M I won't spoil that fun if, if we're gonna go down that road, but you can integrate yes, cosmos data in, in, you know, your metrics into your E R P, but the beauty of, you know, cloud ERPs, right? It's like you're in the web browser anyways, and then you have this nice reporting tool on the next tab Perfect. That integrates seamlessly. It's got all your data, everything's right there. Um, again, I don't wanna steal the power bi thunder here, that might come up later, but you

 

Chuck Coxhead:

Know, yeah, it's coming up next.

 

Anthony Bonaduce:

Yeah, it's, it's all in one, right? I mean, you've got financial and operational reports, you've got dashboards, your user management, your data source, set up your data, it's all in that next tab over. So just click the, click the different tab and everything you need is there.

 

Chuck Coxhead:

Yeah. And that's become the normal working mode is everybody's got open multiple tabs, you get onto these teams meetings, somebody shares their desktop, and you'll see somebody with 25 tabs open in their browser. I mean, who, that's tough. Yeah. Well, that is the perfect segue. You have shared with me another video that I wanna roll right now is you, you know, you had mentioned that you had release recently released info about, uh, power BI integration. So I'm gonna roll that and, uh, I'd love to hear about it.

 

Anthony Bonaduce:

Yeah, absolutely. So what we developed here, and this is, this is again, we don't build what we want. We build what people ask us to build. We think that's a really strong recipe for success. But we were at Directions North America last year. We had, you know, 80 ish attendees in our session, and we basically threw up three or four different things on the screen and said, you know, show of hands, prioritize these features, these major features. It was almost unanimous. Every partner in that room said, just make power bi usable, give us a better solution. And so what we did is we developed a two-way integration between Cosmos and Power BI side. One of the integration is we have an API developed specifically for Power BI that allows you to hook up to your Cosmos data model instantly. Um, that in turn means you don't have to deal with the normal stumbling points, um, and the expensive side of Power bi, which is the data modeling, how do I get all the data wrangled, you know, I have to write SQL Code or dax, or I have to write these custom queries or so on and so forth, right?

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You don't have to do that with Cosmos. You hook it up to your same data. And the kind of bonus benefit there is, whether you're looking at an Excel-based report or a Power BI dashboard, it's one version of the truth. You're using the same data for both of those applications. You're not worrying that the finance team did one thing and our analytics folks did something else, and now we have two numbers for our sales number for January, so who did it? Right? Right. You don't have to worry about that stuff. So that's side one. On the other side of the integration, we have the ability from our Cosmos portal to read the Power BI workspaces reports, dashboards that each user in the organization has access to. Why that's important is because there's other tools that can feed their data to Power bi, but now you've got multiple tools you're juggling.

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And we've found over the years that companies would say, look, these folks aren't highly technical. I it's enough to get them to even use the reporting tool we're putting in front of them. We don't want to give them multiple reporting tools, so they don't wanna say, for dashboards, go to power bi.com and log in for reports. Go use this other tool for these, go to Excel. You know, so everything is in one place inside of Cosmos. You view your Power BI reports and dashboards. You do not leave Cosmos. And so it's truly integrated. And again, that's another good example to your previous question of how's, how else is this integrated with Microsoft? Right? That's another great example.

 

Chuck Coxhead:

And that's one of, again, that's one of the greatest day-to-day complaints is when the user experience is poor. People said, oh, this darn system, oh, it makes me crazy. And if you focus on that user experience up front and you give it something that they're used to working in a mode they're used to working in every day and press the easy button, then they can go complain about something else. And I, I think that's really the beautiful part of this. Yeah. So, yes, so I'm really excited about it. I I'm really excited about the possibilities of what we're gonna be able to deliver to our customers. And, uh, you know, honestly, I'm, I'm looking forward to all the rave reviews about how easy that is. And your team's been amazing. And, you know, even just in getting ready for this podcast, it's been, uh, it's been a great experience to be able to collaborate and talk and get to hear what's in your brain and, and what your intention is and the sincerity in your voice. And I'm here to tell you it's there. And you've, you've already got an early fan, uh, from this e r p partner, and I'm very, very grateful. So do you have any last thoughts for folks, uh, as we conclude here?

 

Anthony Bonaduce:

No, you know, it's, it's, it's, everything goes back to what I said early on, which is, you know, proof's in the pudding, unfortunately on this stuff, you know, I can sit here and tell you it's fantastic, and I'm not gonna turn your podcast into a sales pitch, right? That's not the goal. But I think what it is, is if you're struggling with these things, right? If you're one of those people doing the manual month end close, or you're reporting tool you're using currently is moving at a snails pace, you know, or if you're just considering the move to Business Central, here's what I'll tell you. We don't, we don't really consider our sales team like an actual sales team because we show the product and we listen and we tailor it to the needs of the customer. And most of the time they move forward, right? Because they're seeing the solutions to their problems. So I always tell people, if you're interested in this, just book a demo. There's no cost. It takes no time. Talk to your partner, right? If it's a turnkey customer, talk to turnkey and just say, Hey, I wanna look at this thing, and we'll just block an hour and take you through it, show you the ins and outs, the bells and whistles. You know, how it's gonna make your life easier. And hopefully you love it. So far, everyone loves it. That's,

 

Chuck Coxhead:

That's fantastic. Yep. Yep. Tell it, show it, you know, prove it and deliver it. That's really what it's all about. Well, Anthony, I'm really grateful for your time today and, you know, we do have some more future topics planned to take deeper dives and, and talk more about Cosmos and what it can deliver, and I'm really looking forward to that as well. So thanks for joining us here on Turnkey 365 Podcast. Folks, if you're ready to press the easy button on reporting, get in touch with us. Everything you need to know is gonna be in the show notes. You can connect to Anthony, you can connect to me, you can follow us on LinkedIn and YouTube, and all the great places where you can learn more. And if you're ready to see that demo, let us know. We will make it happen. And you too can take the next step. Whether you're in GP and you're considering a move to BC or some other E R p and you're thinking, Hey, I won the blank canvas that also has this ability to make my reporting super simple, you let us know. That's what we're gonna deliver for you folks. On behalf of Anthony Bon Nucci from Cosmos, my name is Chuck Coxhead on a Turnkey 365 podcast. Thanks so much for playing along. We'll see you next time.