Business intelligence

Business intelligence is a sub-tab under Analytics that turns your numbers into decisions. Where dashboards and reports tell you what happened (“no-show rate: 12%”), Business intelligence tells you what to do about it - each insight pairs an observation with its impact, a recommended action, and the outcome you can expect.

The tab opens with a Forecast section - the forward-looking half that predicts what’s likely to happen next - and the insight cards described below sit beneath it.

Where to find it

In the client portal’s main menu, open Analytics and switch to the Business intelligence tab. You can also:

go straight to Analytics → Business intelligence ↗, or
press ⌘K (Ctrl+K) and search “insights” or “business intelligence”.

Basic and Advanced

Business intelligence comes in two tiers, switched on under Settings → Add-ons → Business intelligence:

Tier	What you get
Basic (included)	The insight cards and standard analytics described on this page - the four-part, severity-ordered decision-support cards, computed from your own history and gated by your team’s analytics access. Basic shows up to 2 insight cards per group: if a group has more, the extra cards are held back behind an Unlock teaser that shows how many are hidden. Every account has Basic, free.
Advanced (paid add-on)	Everything in Basic, with every insight card unlocked (no per-group limit), plus the Forecast section - forward-looking predictions for demand, revenue, no-show risk and guest churn, ML predictions, and peer benchmarking.

On Basic, each group shows at most 2 cards. When a group has more, the rest sit behind a subtle “+N more … insights in Advanced BI” line under the cards; upgrading to Advanced reveals the full set. This is separate from analytics access: access decides which insights you can see at all, while the tier decides how many of the ones you can see are shown.

The Forecast section - the forward-looking predictions powered by the Business intelligence engine - is the Advanced part. On Basic, the Forecast section is replaced by an upgrade prompt; your descriptive insight cards below it stay free.

Advanced needs the Aimy add-on

Advanced BI builds on Aimy, so it requires an active Aimy AI add-on on your account. In the add-on picker, Advanced is disabled until Aimy is enabled - turn Aimy on first, then switch Business intelligence to Advanced.

How it’s billed

Advanced is priced per live venue, the same way as your base platform fee - the add-on fee multiplied by the number of live venues each month. It appears as a monthly Business intelligence add-on line on your invoice, and the charge is prorated if you switch it on partway through a billing period. The current price is shown next to the tier in Settings → Add-ons before you confirm.

How insights work

Insights are computed from your own history - the bookings and reservations across all the venues you run. Each type of insight has a threshold: a card only appears once that threshold trips, so it needs real data behind it. A brand-new account, or a quiet period, may show few or no insights:

No insights to show yet - they appear as your venues gather more bookings.

As your venues gather more activity, more cards appear. Everything spans all your venues and is read-only - looking at an insight never changes anything. Insights recompute automatically once a day, so there’s nothing to refresh by hand; the page shows when the current set was last updated (for example, “Updated 12 Sep · refreshed daily”).

The four-part card

Every insight follows the same shape, which is what makes it decision-support rather than just another chart:

Part	What it tells you
Observation	What happened - the fact, in plain language.
Impact	Why it matters, quantified in £ or % where possible.
Recommendation	The specific action to take.
Expected outcome	What acting on it should achieve.

Each card also carries a deep-link that jumps straight to the screen where you resolve it

for example, Set a deposit policy, Review weekend availability or Launch a campaign - so you can act without hunting for the right page.

How insights are grouped and ordered

Insights are sorted into six groups, shown in this order:

Group	What it covers
⚠️ Attention needed	Things trending the wrong way - e.g. a rising no-show rate or falling revenue.
📈 Performance highlights	Wins worth noticing, such as revenue growth.
💰 Revenue opportunities	Ways to earn more - lost revenue to recover, high-spend patterns to lean into.
👥 Guest behaviour	Patterns in who’s booking, such as a concentration of value in your top guests.
🚪 Operations	Operational signals like which weekdays drive the most no-shows, and demand you’re losing to a full book.
🤖 Recommendations	Suggested next moves.

Within each group, cards are severity-ordered - the most urgent first (critical, then warning, then informational, then positive).

Insights that need a little setup

Most insights appear on their own once your booking history crosses their threshold. A couple draw on information only you can supply, so they’re worth knowing about - do the one-off setup and the card starts appearing once there’s enough behind it.

Did you know: voucher guests spend more than the voucher

Under 💰 Revenue opportunities. This card compares what guests actually spend on the visit where they redeem a gift voucher against the voucher’s face value, and appears when redeemers reliably spend more - so you can see vouchers working as a way to bring in higher-value visits rather than a break-even giveaway.

For it to compute, staff need to record what the guest spent when they redeem a voucher, using the optional “Total spent on this visit” field on the redeem screen. Only redemptions that carry a recorded figure count - blank ones are simply ignored, so the number is always measured, never guessed. The card appears once enough redemptions have a spend recorded and the average is meaningfully above face value. Because it quotes money, it needs Revenue access.

Your review score is improving

Under 📈 Performance highlights. This card appears when your venues’ Google review score climbs by a meaningful margin, showing how far it has moved - for example, “your average Google review score improved from 4.4 to 4.7”.

It needs a linked Google profile. Connect your venue’s Google Business Profile under the venue’s Google Business Integration settings; Sidedoor then keeps your Google star rating in sync and quietly builds up a history of it. The card can only appear once there’s a run of that history to compare against - so it won’t show the moment you link, but will once your rating has been tracked for a while and has genuinely improved.

Ask Aimy

An Ask Aimy about your business box sits above the insight cards for a deeper-dive question - making more money, spotting weaknesses, forecasting, or what to do next. For example:

where am I leaving money on the table, and what should I fix first?

what are my biggest opportunities to grow revenue this quarter?

based on these trends, what should I expect over the next month?

Pressing Ask Aimy (or one of the example prompts) opens the Aimy chat panel, where Aimy answers with a briefing grounded in your own insights, as a conversation you can keep asking follow-up questions in.

Aimy takes into account the period and venues selected on this page, so a question is scoped to what’s on screen - naming a different period or venue in your question overrides it.

Who can see what

Business intelligence respects each teammate’s analytics access, just like the rest of Analytics:

Insights that quote money need Revenue access.
Insights built on guest-level detail (for example, a top-guest concentration) need Guest access.

An insight you don’t have the matching access for simply doesn’t appear for you - there’s nothing to unlock or request inline. Account owners see everything; grant these levels for custom roles under Team, roles & permissions.

Enhanced by Aimy

Every insight’s Recommendation and Expected outcome are rule-based and always shown - Business intelligence works perfectly well on its own.

When the Aimy add-on is enabled on your account, Aimy can rewrite that advice into warmer, more natural language - the numbers never change. Only the wording is refined; every figure, percentage and money amount stays exactly as computed from your own data, and the recommended action stays the same.

A card that Aimy has genuinely rewritten carries a small ✨ Enhanced by Aimy badge next to its severity label. Cards that show the standard rule-based wording carry no badge - so the badge always tells you the truth about which advice was AI-refined. If a rewrite can’t be produced for a card, it simply keeps its rule-based text and stays un-badged.

A few things to know:

The badge marks the wording, not the figures - the underlying observation, impact and numbers are identical whether or not a card is badged.
It only appears when the Aimy add-on is on. With Aimy off, every card reads exactly as before, with no badge.
Enrichment uses your Aimy allowance, the same allowance as Aimy’s other features. It refreshes alongside the daily insight compute, so it’s worked out once a day rather than every time you open the page. If your allowance for the period is used up, cards keep their full rule-based advice (just without the badge).

Forecast - the forward-looking half of this same tab.
Analytics & reporting overview - how access levels and measures work.
Dashboards - ready-made curated views, including the Booking demand card behind the “guests you may be turning away” insight.
Reports - build and save your own.
Aimy, your portal assistant - more on the chat panel Ask opens.