The board deck says one number. The warehouse says another. Everyone has a favorite.
Reporting chaos isn't a tooling problem — it's an ownership problem. We build the pipeline from your systems into one governed model, and Power BI reports on top of it that the CFO trusts at 3am the night before the board meeting.
It looks straightforward on paper. It never is.
Data lives in every system and agrees in none. Reports are hand-built, definitions drift by department, and the person who understands the spreadsheet is on vacation when the board meets.
Self-serve BI without governance made it worse: more dashboards, more versions of the truth.
One source of truth. Reports your CFO trusts at 3am the night before the audit.
Every report reads from the same governed model — 'revenue' means one thing, written down, enforced in code.
The Monday-morning export-and-paste ritual is gone. Data flows in on schedule, failures alert someone, and the dashboard is simply current.
Analysts build on the certified model with guardrails — so exploration thrives and the wild-west of forked spreadsheets ends.
The playbook, phase by phase.
The order matters: agree what the numbers mean, build the pipeline that makes them true, then make them beautiful. Reports first is how you got here.
Finance, ops, and sales in a room until 'revenue,' 'active customer,' and 'margin' each have exactly one definition — signed. This is the hardest phase and the whole point.
Dynamics, SQL, the ERP, the line-of-business apps — profiled, cleaned at the edge, and flowed into a staging layer with lineage you can trace.
The metric dictionary becomes a semantic model — measures coded once, security roles applied, certified as THE model.
The executive pack, the ops dashboards, the board view — designed with their consumers, wired to the model, refreshed on schedule.
New metrics enter through the dictionary, analysts get certified-model access, and drift gets caught by reconciliation checks — the chaos doesn't regrow.
Week ranges reflect a typical engagement — your written plan comes with dates and fixed prices before anything starts.
The horror stories, and the engineering that prevents them.
BI projects don't usually die — they decay. The four decay patterns, and the engineering against each:
It demoed perfectly; finance reconciled it once and never opened it again.
Every department forked the dataset and adjusted the measure 'just for us.'
A schema change upstream; the dashboard silently froze.
The pipeline was a personal masterpiece; now it's an inherited mystery.
Assembled from published, fixed-price engagements.
Analytics engagements are assembled from published services — the model and pipeline work, then the reporting on top.
Names, not logos.
Clients whose numbers finally agree — their stories, recorded.
Recorded by the clients themselves — real names, real projects. Videos open in a new tab.
Questions we get asked, answered without spin.
If your question isn't here, ask it below — an engineer answers by email, and Mike reads every one.
Power BI or Fabric?
Power BI is the reporting layer either way. Fabric enters when data volume, source count, or engineering needs outgrow dataflows — the assessment makes that call with numbers, and starting in Power BI now doesn't paint you out of Fabric later; the semantic model carries forward.
Our data is a mess. Do we clean it first?
No — cleaning without a target model is how projects wander for a year. The metric dictionary defines what clean means; then cleansing happens in the pipeline where it's repeatable, not as a one-time heroic purge.
Can we keep our existing reports during the build?
Yes. Old reports keep running until their replacement reconciles and their consumers sign off — then they're retired deliberately, with redirects to the new ones. No flag-day.
How do you handle row-level security — sales reps seeing only their region?
In the model, once: security roles tied to Entra ID groups, tested per persona, documented in the security matrix. Not per-report filters that leak the moment someone builds a new page.
What does this cost?
Each phase is fixed-price and paid after approval. A single-source executive dashboard is a small engagement; a multi-source governed model is a project — the definitions phase produces the exact plan and price for yours.
Talk to the person who’ll actually be accountable.
Thirty minutes with Mike — our CEO, not a sales rep. He’ll tell you whether we’re the right fit, including when we’re not.