Little help with direction of development

Hello everyone

First of all hello to everyone, this is my first post and I am still learning to use SharePoint but I hope that I will become a valuable addition to your community as time progresses. 🙂 Secondly, sorry for the long post – I want to give as much details as I can!

Just recently company I work for has moved to SharePoint (The online version from Office 365, Business Subscription) to manage files and team collaboration. I was tasked with setting it all up, and having never used SharePoint before in my life I must say its a slow learning process. Now my boss thinks about Business Intelligence solutions that we could integrate with SharePoint and that is where my problem starts.

A bit of background about my company and the business is in order here; company I work for is mainly dealing with Business Analysis and Accountancy Support. My boss has created all those intricate dashboards in Excel using it as database really, to produce very detailed financial reports and summaries with drill-down to detail. Now he is moving away from Excel to Access with the idea to create interactive financial reports for our clients that are cloud based and accessible anywhere. Not tied to particular piece of software ( as in each of our clients needs to have Excel installed to be able to view and use our current products ) or operating system (SharePoint apps render as good on Linux based browsers as they do on Windows based ones). 

We can recreate almost everything in Access 2013 apart from the data visualisations (graphs, charts and so on) which is a problem for us.

My question to all SharePoint gurus here: In your personal opinion what is the best SharePoint solution to be able to create online interactive financial reports with nice dashboards and data visualisations.

I have read about limitations of the online version of SharePoint vs. the On Premises SharePoint implementation. We went with the online version simply to save on costs but we will consider on premises approach if there is no viable solution to my current problem.

Does anyone use Excel Services here for similar purposes and can recommend it?

What about Performance Point Services and Business Intelligence Centre? There are soooo many different solutions from MS that I am simply having problems wrapping my head around it all and finding what would be the best for us.

Thanks a million to anyone who will help to guide me in the right direction! I do not need much 🙂 just simple advice about what service or product to use.

Paul