What does a BI analyst do?
Quick answer
A BI analyst turns business questions into numbers people can trust. Most of the week goes on three things: agreeing exactly how each number is defined, getting clean data from the company’s systems, and building and maintaining the dashboards and reports managers use to decide what to do.
Last updated
Updated · By Robert Breen
A typical week
On Monday the sales director asks why revenue in the West region dropped. The analyst checks the data source first: are all orders there, or did an export fail? Then they drill down from region to store to product and find one store that stopped selling a discontinued line.
Midweek goes on a new request: a dashboard for the support team. Before building anything, the analyst agrees what "resolved" means and whether reopened tickets count twice. On Friday they fix a calculated field that averaged an average, which had been understating margin by two points.
The skills it takes
| Skill | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| A BI tool (Tableau, Power BI or Looker Studio) | Where the charts and dashboards are built |
| Spreadsheets | Still where much of the data arrives, and the quickest place to check a total |
| SQL | Getting data out of databases and the data warehouse |
| Defining metrics | Two teams with different definitions of "revenue" will never agree on a chart |
| Asking good questions | A dashboard without a clear question is a wall of charts nobody opens |
How to start
Learn the ideas in What is business intelligence? and Dimensions vs measures, then build a small public dashboard from sample data in Tableau Public. A published dashboard that answers one clear question is a better portfolio piece than a certificate.
Learn it step by step
Free beginner lessons with a worked example and a quick quiz.
- What Is Business Intelligence? A Beginner’s Guide (about 8 minutes)
- Dimensions vs Measures in Tableau, With Examples (about 9 minutes)
Terms in this answer
Frequently asked questions
- Do BI analysts need to code?
- Most use SQL regularly. Python helps for heavier data work but is not required for many BI roles.
- Is a BI analyst the same as a data analyst?
- They overlap a lot. BI analysts focus more on recurring dashboards and reporting; data analysts do more one-off investigations. Many job titles use the words interchangeably.
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