MIP Fund Accounting vs Power BI For Office 365

• The interface and operations of Abila MIP Fund are fairly easy to utilize and learn.
• It offers some excellent tools for managing a non-profit operation.
• The software makes it easy to streamline operations into one system without dealing with separate departments working with different systems.

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• Easy to make visual dashboards from SQL queries. Previously we had to use a third party application that had to run on a web server that was so complex to setup and run. PowerBI removes all that.
• Ability to control who/which group has access to each dashboard or report. Ties in well with the rest of the Office 365 ecosystem.
• Has many connectors to allow pulling data from various systems, both onsite (via gateway) or external (via APIs), and join the data to create a report/dashboard.
• Ability to show data but also export the data, if permitted.
• Easy to show PowerBI dashboards on SharePoint or on other websites via embedded code.

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• It would be nice to switch between databases without having to logout and login.
• When entering codes (like for a journal entry) it doesn't auto-search/fill the account numbers...you have to hit the dropdown and scroll for the number.
• You can't post cash receipts without first having an invoice, which can slow down your processing.

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• Licensing: Currently, Microsoft has a fixed pricing model for Office 365 users, regardless of role/function of the user. Most organizations have a small number of "power users" that create usable content and many more "consumers" that simply view/run reports created by power users. Microsoft does not differentiate between these users, and thus the pricing limits organizations from large deployments of the software.
• Version incompatibility: Excel 2010 and 2013 workbooks are compatible with each other. However, workbooks created in 2010 that include PowerPivot databases must be upgraded to 2013 format to run in 2013. Subsequently, you cannot open these upgraded PowerPivot workbooks in 2010. This requires ALL users to be on the same version.
• Visualization: Excel charting with PowerPivot workbooks is adequate for many users. Power View also contains a number of GREAT visualizations, including animated bubble charts and a very flexible dashboard/report design canvas. However, compared to some of the other self-service BI solutions, it is still limited in its visualization capabilities.

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• Abila has streamlined and allowed more tasks to be automated maximizing the efficiency of staff so more staff is not needed.
• The Maintenance and Support annual fee is a bit expensive and not a very good return especially for the amount of features that are updated from year to year. I don't use support a lot since our systems are pretty efficient so hence I don't think the annual M&S is justifiable.
• Abila's importing feature allows integration to many different systems which makes Abila very flexible allowing costs to be saved if the owner of the Abila system switches between vendors.

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• As a Microsoft Partner implementing Business Intelligence solutions, Power BI has removed the barrier for our clients to begin the "BI journey". So often, projects get hung up in that early phase of procuring and installing/configuring expensive hardware and software. Just simply getting started and designing a beginning solution has allowed our clients to see results in 1-2 weeks using their data that might have taken months to achieve otherwise.
• One significant ROI example is process improvement. In many cases, individuals or teams are spending days each month gathering data from multiple sources for reporting to their constituents. We are reducing these times to minutes by automating many of the data collection and integration processes that were previously manual.

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