Introducing Data Input

We’ve all been there: you’re running an analysis in your BI tool, but you hit a wall — the data you need isn’t in your data warehouse. Maybe it’s in a spreadsheet somewhere, or it’s just a few values you have floating around, like goals you need to track or adjustments you need to make. Never again. Now, it’s easy to upload and input data via Omni directly to your data warehouse 🥳. 

Adding data with Omni is as easy as uploading an existing CSV or manually inputting data by hand so you can instantly start analyzing. You can iterate on that data with features like Calculations and AI, and promote useful metrics and definitions right within Omni for others to use, as well as write back directly to your data warehouse. 

Start with a quick CSV upload or manual entry — Omni instantly turns it into a living table in your data warehouse. Need to extend your financial forecast to future quarters? Just add a few rows. Forgot to segment that forecast by region? No problem. Drop in a new column, adjust your numbers, and you're set. Omni makes it simple to start small and scale effortlessly into repeatable workflows.

Data input opens up so many more ways to work with your data, no matter where it lives. Our team and customers have already been using it for a while, below I’ll walk you through a few of my favorite use cases, including:

• Managing new product beta features

• Enhancing customer-facing reports

• Tracking financial goals & adjusting models

• Enriching Go-to-Market lead lists

Until now, analyzing data that’s not stored in your data warehouse has been a challenge for all BI tools.

You can upload, but you can’t standardize or reuse: Some BI tools make it possible to manually upload data from CSVs, but they don’t enable users to create standardization or re-usability around these uploads, perpetuating manual and one-off workflows. This makes it hard to track and trust different versions of the metric or build upon previous analyses as data constantly changes. Even though you might benefit from the analysis you did with the CSV, no one else can — which limits the impact of your work to an isolated spreadsheet.

You can’t upload, so you have to work outside of BI: On the flip side, other BI tools require all data to be in the data warehouse or modeled upfront before it can be analyzed. This slow process typically forces people to abandon important questions or take matters into their own hands by conducting analyses outside of the BI tool, most often Excel. That creates a new problem: instead of fostering metric consistency and report traceability, you’re now faced with metrics and reports living in multiple places with no way to govern it all or replicate it in a scalable way. 

Both options force you to choose between moving fast and ensuring accuracy. With Omni, you can perform both fast and accurate analyses using data from anywhere. 

My favorite use cases…so far #

Managing new product features #

Of course, we use Omni at Omni. And recently, uploading a CSV helped me solve a problem I was facing (albeit a good problem to have): shipping new features so quickly that it can be hard to track, even for me 😅.

I use a spreadsheet to track beta features ready for customers because it allows me to add friendly names, feature descriptions, and keep up with our product development. Customers often ask me where they can keep up with new beta features — my options previously were to share the spreadsheet directly with customers or ask engineering to build a new page in the app to list all the betas. But now, it’s easy for me to create a new table directly in an Omni workbook, join it against our live production app data, then surface it back to customers in their usage analytics dashboard — allowing them to easily track new betas to test right from Omni.

The best part is that as we add new features, I can make updates in two seconds and immediately surface the latest list back to our customers — without having to work through engineering to add new data to the warehouse.

Enhancing customer-facing reports at Aura #

Aura, the workforce intelligence platform, uses Omni for internal analytics and customer-facing reports. Now, non-technical users like customer success managers and account executives can add new data to reports for customers — without taking away from engineering resources to build a new ETL pipeline.

When new quarterly financial reports are published, the data is relevant to Aura’s customers but it doesn’t live in their data warehouse. Previously, enhancing customer-facing reports with these new data points would require engineering resources. Now, the Aura account teams can self-serve by simply uploading a CSV with the additional data to Omni so they can add the latest relevant information to their customer reports.

“A lot of our non-technical users are able to upload data that doesn’t live in our data warehouse; it’s fantastic because they don’t need engineering resources to do their work. As someone who leads engineering, Omni’s helped open up my bandwidth because I don’t have to give up as much engineering time and resources to help people do their jobs.”Setareh Lotfi, CTO @ Aura

Tracking financial metrics  #

Some of the most common reasons our customers need to analyze data not already in their warehouse are for financial tracking and modeling. 

For example, comparing revenue projections to actual revenue. Since goals and projections typically aren’t available in a data warehouse, finance teams often export from their BI tool and run analyses in Excel. Now, it’s easy to track revenue, goals, and make manual adjustments to your financial model in one place — with the traceability, security, and reusability of the data model.

Enriching leads lists for Go-to-Market (GTM) #

For go-to-market teams, we’re seeing so many unique use cases —  from uploading social media campaign performance to building custom commission calculations right in Omni (more on that soon 😉).

Another common GTM use case is lead enrichment. Now, it’s trivial to take a target account list from a partner, event, or sales rep and upload it into Omni. Then, you can promote it back to your data warehouse to analyze it alongside your CRM data. This helps you optimize your outreach by consolidating data from various sources to get a full picture of your relationship with a prospect. 

What’s next #

Our goal is to help everyone easily analyze data, and this makes it even faster to get started. It brings any data you need within reach and helps power users cut down on running repeat analyses, exporting out of your BI tool, and tracking ad-hoc spreadsheets from various sources.

If you’d like to see what else our product team is working on, be sure to check out our weekly development demos for a peek at what’s coming next!