At Ablaze Collective, we use Metabase as the front end of our Back end as a Service (BaaS) app to deliver seamless, interactive business intelligence solutions to CPA firms. Metabase is a powerful, open-source tool that simplifies business intelligence, offering a wide array of features, from embeddable charts and interactive dashboards to SQL editors and data sandboxing.

This guide provides an overview of what comes in the box when you use Metabase, showcasing the many tools in its toolkit. Whether you're new to Metabase or a seasoned user, this tour of its feature set will help you get the most out of its capabilities—especially since major updates are added regularly.

What is Metabase?
Metabase is an open-source business intelligence tool that connects to a variety of popular databases. At Ablaze Collective, we leverage Metabase to allow firms to ask meaningful questions of their data, presenting answers in intuitive formats, whether it's a bar chart, table, or custom dashboard. By integrating Metabase into our app, we're able to offer CPA firms best-in-class BI and analytics services.

Metabase connects to multiple databases
You can save your questions and group them into elegant, easy-to-share dashboards. Metabase also enables seamless collaboration, making it easy for teams to analyze and share insights from their data.

Let’s walk through the key features that make Metabase such an essential part of the Ablaze app:

Query and visualize your data
Metabase supports various databases, including a Sample Database to experiment with. Once connected to your data sources, Metabase provides tools that make it simple to explore your data. At Ablaze Collective, we integrate Metabase to give CPA firms the ability to seamlessly query and visualize the vast amounts of 'hidden' API data in their QuickBooks cloud portfolios.

Ask questions with the query builder
You can use Metabase's query builder to filter and summarize data without writing code. For more advanced users, SQL-based queries allow for complex data interactions. At Ablaze, this functionality ensures that firms of all sizes can dig into their data to extract meaningful insights with ease.

Native queries
For those more comfortable with SQL or other query languages, Metabase’s native query editor allows you to compose custom questions directly. This flexibility is one reason why we chose Metabase as our front end—its adaptability suits a range of user skill levels.

Create models to streamline future queries
At Ablaze, we use Metabase’s modeling feature to pull together data from various sources, creating easy-to-use starting points for recurring queries. This is crucial for CPA firms managing large data sets across multiple clients, ensuring consistency and efficiency.

Upload spreadsheets and visualize results
Metabase even allows users to upload and analyze CSV files, offering quick ad hoc analysis and visualization of spreadsheet data. The platform automatically guesses the best visualization for your results, with 16 different chart types available.

Embed charts and share your results
At Ablaze Collective, we use Metabase to help CPA firms build interactive dashboards that visualize key data points, with the ability to embed charts for easy sharing. Whether you're managing 10 clients or 1,000, the app provides a scalable solution for multi-company reporting.

Create interactive dashboards
Metabase makes it simple to organize data into dashboards. You can add filters and contextualize data with text cards, making it easier for firms to drill into the data that matters most. At Ablaze, we white-label these dashboards, empowering firms to present data under their own brand.

Find things and stay organized
Metabase also helps you stay organized by allowing you to search, create collections, and pin key dashboards or questions. This functionality is essential for CPA firms that manage large volumes of data across clients.

Customize Metabase
We take full advantage of Metabase’s customizable settings to ensure our clients get a tailored experience. From permissions and localization to integrating Slack and email alerts, Metabase helps Ablaze offer a streamlined, user-friendly solution for managing data and reporting.

Best-in-class BI and analytics services
At Ablaze Collective, we believe technology evolves rapidly, and many tech companies fail not because of inferior products, but due to a lack of human capital for training and support. That’s why we white-label our app for each firm, allowing them to resell it under their own name while offering top-tier BI and analytics services. We offer the Ablaze App at a low cost of entry, so firms can focus on what matters most—leveraging the professional services we provide to truly maximize the potential of their data.