Starter dashboard
$2,500fixed
One dashboard, up to three pages, from up to two data sources. Cleaned, modeled and set to refresh, with one round of changes and a 30-minute walkthrough. About two weeks after we get data access. No scoping fee.
Reporting and dashboards
Your sales, margin, inventory and cash on one page, refreshed on a schedule from the systems you already run. Built in Power BI or as a web dashboard, with every number tied back to the books.
From your systems to one page
Your systems
QuickBooks, SQL Server, Fishbowl, Excel, web and ad data
The data work
Pulled out on a schedule, cleaned, and joined into one data model (the ETL and Power Query step)
The dashboard
Power BI, or a web page your team opens in a browser
Kept current
Refreshed on a schedule and reconciled to the books
Three ways to start
Custom BI build
$6,000 to $20,000
Several sources, data pipelines, a proper data model, and dashboards in Power BI or on the web. Quoted fixed after a paid scoping step that credits toward the build. Three to six weeks.
Your data team
From $300a month
Refresh monitoring, fixes when a source changes, and an agreed number of change hours each month. Three plans, month to month.
Power BI or a web dashboard
| Consideration | Power BI | Web dashboard |
|---|---|---|
| Licensing | A Power BI Pro license per viewer, from Microsoft | None |
| Outside users (customers, vendors) | Possible, with extra licensing | Built in, with a login |
| Interactivity | Filters, drill-down and export, out of the box | Whatever we build, from charts to data entry |
| Hosting | Microsoft's cloud, inside your 365 account | Our managed hosting, or yours |
| Best for | Teams already on Microsoft 365 | Portals, shop-floor screens, no per-seat cost |
Reports owners ask for
- Margin by job, product or customer
- Inventory on hand and on order, by location
- Sales against last year, by rep and by product line
- Cash this week: what's owed to you and what you owe
- A balance that ties out to QuickBooks
Screens that update as work happens, for the shop floor and the counter, are on their own page: Live data.
Board and investor packs
The monthly package your board, your bank or your investors expect, pulled from the systems and laid out the same way every month. It goes out on a schedule as a PDF or a shared page, with the numbers already reconciled.
Setup from $3,500, then from $300 a month to keep it running. The hours spent copying numbers into slides come back.
Dashboards inside your own software
If your team already works in an internal app or a customer portal, the charts can live there, with the same filters and drill-down, instead of behind a second login. We build the pieces and place them in your pages.
Quoted after scoping, from $9,000. It needs a web application we are allowed to change, or one we built.
Portals for customers and vendors
A login where your customers see their own orders, project status or balances, and your vendors see what you need from them, read from your systems as they change. Fewer status calls, and a reason to keep buying from you.
Quoted after scoping, from $9,000. Each user sees only their own records, and you decide who gets in.
Before we start
What we ask
- Which systems hold the numbers, and can we read them: a database, an API or an export?
- Who needs to see what, and on which device?
- Which figures have to tie to the books, and to which close?
- How often do the numbers have to refresh: nightly, hourly, or as they change?
- When a number is wrong, who owns it?
What we need from you
- Read-only access to each source, on a named account for us
- One month-end close to reconcile against
- A sample of the report you build by hand today
- One person who can answer questions about the data within a day
What will not work
- Screenshots or PDFs as a data source
- A system with no export and no API
- A number nobody in the business owns
- A shared login we are asked to use
Recent project
Labor and inventory reporting platform
A weekly report that took 2 to 3 hours to rebuild in Excel became a web app that refreshes every 10 minutes: labor against target for every build on the floor, with inventory values and month-end numbers joined in later.
Read the case study