RSSBus feeds Proto your business data | April 13, 2007
by Byron Binkley
A while back we did a blog post showing how Proto could consume a rich RSS feed made with Yahoo! Pipes to create an apartment searching and management application. I then learned about RSSBus from a Proto user’s blog, and I got excited about the opportunities that would open up if Proto could access RSS feeds of business data. There’s a good post by Prashanth Rai talking about this very topic and the enterprise information ecosystem of the future if you want additional background.
At ETech we had a chance to meet the RSSBus team and saw first hand how they deliver on turning proprietary data and applications into RSS feeds. Since Proto’s goal is to turn structured data and services into useful applications, I had to check it out first hand.
Here’s what I came up with:
In many businesses, client entertainment is a substantial cost. Managers, CFOs, and COOs would like to know if the $2,000 wine bill in Atlanta actually helped their salesperson close a deal. And since RSSBus can output feeds of the relevant data, Proto can provide the front-end to manage and report on the data sources to show the relationship between expenses and revenues.
To do this, we used RSSBus feeds that could be generated for:
- American Express charges for a given user account
- Salesforce.com Opportunities
- QuickBooks Expense categories or a Google spreadsheet with a standard list of categories
- A set of files with the Amex charges tagged by users (created using Proto) that link each expense to an Opportunity in a particular category
- A feed of booked revenues for opportunities (either from Salesforce.com or QuickBooks)
The illustration below shows how these data sets come together:
Next, I'll walk through the specific applications.
Here’s how the Proto applications work:
Tagging the Amex Expenses with an Opportunity and an Expense Type:
This tool pulls recent Amex charges and puts them in a table for the end user to tag them with a corresponding expense category and opportunity. Since these end users aren’t expected to love this process, we made it as easy as possible by populating the list-box choices in the table with Salesforce.com opportunities and expense categories.In addition to making the process simple enough that it should only take 2 minutes a week this has the added benefit of keeping the data clean at the point of entry.
The same idea and infrastructure could easily be applied to an environment that didn’t rely on Salesforce.com opportunities and instead was a list of accounts, banks, artists, or any other client that is the beneficiary of entertainment. Anyway, you get the idea: the Amex expenses are now correctly bucketed and associated with revenue opportunities.
When the user is done, they push the results to a file (or database, or spreadsheet, etc.) so that RSSBus can provide a consolidated feed of correctly associated Amex expenses.
This feed along with the actual booked revenues, from Salesforce.com or QuickBooks to name a couple possible sources, are mashed together into two more Proto applications shown below.
1. Drill down report of total expenses and revenues.
This view shows the total revenue and expenses for each salesperson on the left hand side. Clicking on any bar in the graph further breaks down that salesperson’s expenses and revenue on a deal by deal basis. Clicking on one of those bars (on the right hand side) shows the individual American Express charges associated with the revenue. Again, the extensions are endless – but the idea is the same: by combining proprietary feeds of data, spending can be related to success.
2. Show expenses by date, colored by either Salesperson or Expense Category.
The next screen I threw together shows a distribution of expenses over time. Coloring the points by category shows trends in expense types or salesperson spending. Also, specific points can be drilled into to see the actual American Express expense details for large or otherwise unusual bills. Again, the possibility for extensions and modifications abound – these are just starting points to get ideas flowing.
In summary, we take data that will never be integrated into an enterprise-scale data warehouse, and we tactically combine it with the help of RSSBus into useful business intelligence and decision support tools. Is this type of ad-hoc integration the future of mashups in enterprises and SMBs? We think so.
CFOs and COOs get the clarity they need to optimize their revenue-driving entertainment and sales expenses. Salespeople don’t have to endure a painful or tedious process to categorize their expenses because the relevant choices and sources are pulled together for them in one custom user interface. Everyone wins.
