For mid-market and emerging businesses, data is no longer a luxury. It's a necessity. But having a data team isn't enough. To truly unlock value, your data team must adopt a business-focused approach.

Bringing data together from different systems into one dashboard is one of the most effective ways to improve business decision-making. When teams can view sales, marketing, finance and customer insights in one place, it's easier to spot patterns, track performance and take action.

This blog walks through how to build a dashboard from multiple data sources, with a focus on choosing the right metrics first, selecting tools that work for your team, and building trust in the data you see.

In this video, Pentify Insights co-founder Tom Clements joins the "Practice Makes Perfect" series to break down what data and analytics really means for small to mid-sized Australian businesses.

This post breaks down why the month-end close drags on, what underlying issues tend to cause the delays, and where teams can look for meaningful improvements.

If you’re a CFO, COO, or operations lead, you’ve likely heard this complaint: "We spend too much time on manual reporting."

And if your team is still chasing spreadsheets, copying and pasting across systems, and running the same reports over and over again, it’s not just a time sink, it’s a risk to your business.

As more Australian businesses embrace digital tools, cloud apps, and software as a service platforms, the challenge isn’t finding data, it’s bringing it together in a way that actually helps you run and grow your business.

Finance teams in small to medium businesses often juggle spreadsheets, local files and manual reports.

If you're a CFO or finance leader still relying on Excel to run critical reporting, you're not alone, but you’re also not set up for the speed and complexity today’s business environment demands.

Manual Excel reporting eats up time, introduces errors, and holds back decision-making. But there’s a smarter way forward.

If you’re a CFO, you already know the pain of relying on manual reports, inconsistent data, and teams spending hours each week chasing numbers. You want automated dashboards that are accurate, live, and meaningful. But building this in-house can feel impossible without adding another hire. The good news? You don’t have to.

If you’re a COO or CFO of a growing business in Melbourne, you already know how crucial data is to decision-making. But knowing you need a data strategy and finding the right partner to help you build one are two different things.

If you’re a marketing or growth leader, chances are you’ve got GA4 and HubSpot running side by side. But here’s the problem - they don’t talk to each other.

You end up toggling between platforms, trying to stitch together how your website traffic, conversions, and pipeline actually connect.

As mid-market and emerging businesses look to unlock more value from their data, many COOs are facing a familiar crossroads: should we hire a full-time data analyst or bring in a fractional data team?

At Pentify Insights, we help mid-market and emerging businesses take control of their data. That could mean setting a clearer strategy, building better reports, or reducing time spent chasing numbers. Our focus is on solving real problems and helping teams use data in a way that supports day-to-day work and longer-term decisions.

It has been over a year since the Chairman of the NRL boldly claimed that the NRL was the number one sporting code in the country, prompting the Pentify team to scrutinise this daring declaration in part I of King of the Codes. With the dust now settled on newly-established feature rounds in the form of Magic round and Gather round for the NRL and AFL respectively, we thought it would be a good time to revisit this topic with some updated data insights (obviously!) and restart the conversation, perhaps making a couple of courageous proclamations ourselves.

The organisation is now focused on embedding our recommendations, with immediate priorities including automation of reporting processes, further uplift of data literacy, and the roll-out of their SSOT framework. These next steps will enable deeper analytics capability and support a shift towards proactive, data-led decision-making.

Not only did our reporting solution provide a clear and consistent view of gross profit, a view that was previously unachievable, we also discovered several key insights that management were not aware of. As an example, our data discovery showed that for one particular product category, they were charging their clients a labour cost that was 28% less than the actual labour cost, a change that since implementation has seen gross profit for that category grow by over 16%, and overall business gross profit grow by over 5%. In addition to this, the sales team are now able to drill-down on their customers and determine specific pricing strategies to optimise business performance, and track their analytics more efficiently, delivering efficiency gains. 

Pentify Insights: Kicking Off 2025 with Impact. Welcome to the fourth edition of the Pentify Insights newsletter – and what a start to the year it has been!

We’re thrilled to share a white paper we’ve developed in collaboration with BetaShares, focusing on how small to medium financial planning practices can get more out of their data and analytics in Xplan.

Data as a Service (DaaS) is a data management and delivery model where organisation data and analytics is managed securely over the internet and delivered on-demand to end-users. It enables organisations to have an all-encompassing data operating model without costly underlying assets, both IT infrastructure and human resources.

Our client is now reviewing and critiquing the rest of their reporting functionalist to identify where automation can be leveraged to save team members and managements capacity.