“I think on a monthly basis we saw an overall reduction of almost $30,000 a month. For a nonprofit, that's significant.”
Don · 0:04Read the transcript →Watch ↗Solution 06 · Data & Analytics
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.
Engagement shape
Model first
one governed model, then the reports
Pricing model
Fixed price
per phase, pay after approval
Source of truth
One
definitions written down and enforced in the model
Where it runs
Your tenant
Power BI / Fabric under your governance
01 / The problem
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.
02 / Solved looks like
One source of truth. Reports your CFO trusts at 3am the night before the audit.
01
Numbers that reconcile because they come from one place.Every report reads from the same governed model — 'revenue' means one thing, written down, enforced in code.
02
Reports that refresh themselves.The Monday-morning export-and-paste ritual is gone. Data flows in on schedule, failures alert someone, and the dashboard is simply current.
03
Self-service that doesn't become chaos.Analysts build on the certified model with guardrails — so exploration thrives and the wild-west of forked spreadsheets ends.
03 / How we run it
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.
Phase 01Weeks 1–2
The definitions summit.
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.
You receive Metric dictionary, signed by the owners
Phase 02Weeks 2–5
Connect the sources.
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.
You receive Source inventory + working pipelines
Phase 03Weeks 4–7
Build the governed model.
The metric dictionary becomes a semantic model — measures coded once, security roles applied, certified as THE model.
You receive Certified semantic model + security matrix
Phase 04Weeks 6–9
The reports that matter.
The executive pack, the ops dashboards, the board view — designed with their consumers, wired to the model, refreshed on schedule.
You receive Production reports + refresh monitoring
Phase 05Ongoing
Govern and grow.
New metrics enter through the dictionary, analysts get certified-model access, and drift gets caught by reconciliation checks — the chaos doesn't regrow.
You receive Governance runbook + monthly health report
Week ranges reflect a typical engagement — your written plan comes with dates and fixed prices before anything starts.
04 / What goes wrong elsewhere
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:
The story you’ve heardWhat’s in our plan for it
“Beautiful dashboard, wrong numbers.”
It demoed perfectly; finance reconciled it once and never opened it again.
Reconciliation against the current source of truth is a phase gate — the model ships when finance signs that the numbers match, not when the visuals sparkle.
“Seventeen versions of 'revenue.'”
Every department forked the dataset and adjusted the measure 'just for us.'
One certified model, measures locked in code, self-service built on top of it — forks are unnecessary because the definitions are shared and the model is fast.
“The refresh broke in July. It's October.”
A schema change upstream; the dashboard silently froze.
Refresh monitoring with alerts to named owners, plus data-freshness stamps on every report page — staleness is visible to readers, not hidden from them.
“The one analyst who understood it left.”
The pipeline was a personal masterpiece; now it's an inherited mystery.
Lineage documentation, naming standards, and a handover session are deliverables. Your model is boring to maintain on purpose — masterpieces belong in museums.
05 / Services that combine
Assembled from published, fixed-price engagements.
Analytics engagements are assembled from published services — the model and pipeline work, then the reporting on top.
Reports & modelPower BI Dashboard and Report DevelopmentTime&Materials @ $175/hr · ≈ 2 weeksThe data estateAzure Data Factory and Fabric Data Pipeline DevelopmentTime&Materials @ $175/hr · ≈ 4 weeksFrom your ERP/CRMDynamics 365 Business Central Integration DevelopmentTime&Materials @ $175/hr · ≈ 4 weeksAutomate the feedsMicrosoft Graph API Mastery and Integration Services$175 per hour · ≈ 5 days
See the full catalog →06 / Proof
Names, not logos.
Clients whose numbers finally agree — their stories, recorded.
“If not for IT Partner, I would probably be looking at one or two full-time employees to do that support, which would probably cost me a quarter million dollars a year.”
Vero Biotech · 0:03Read the transcript →Watch ↗“There was no downtime at all, and it was seamless. And the biggest thing is the forecast to project time: they were on it. We were never delayed. IT Partner fulfilled their scope when they said they would.”
Jeff · 1:41Read the transcript →Watch ↗“No vendor has ever taken care of me like you guys do.”
Clifford · 0:17Read the transcript →Watch ↗“It saves me hundreds of hours, because there's no way I could have set this thing up by myself.”
James · 0:10Read the transcript →Watch ↗“We typically just send an email to ask for a couple of additional licenses … and within probably an hour it's all set up and assigned by them, which is a huge benefit for us.”
Taylor · 3:18Read the transcript →Watch ↗“…we love having you as partners, because you really give us peace of mind on the day-to-day operations.”
Steve · 4:11Read the transcript →Watch ↗“I've been doing this in apparel for a little over 30 years. I've done seven or eight system conversions. There's always an issue with it. … this was probably the easiest experience I've ever gone through.”
Philip · 10:54Read the transcript →Watch ↗Recorded by the clients themselves — real names, real projects. Every recording has a full transcript on its page; videos open in a new tab. All eight, with transcripts →
07 / Honest answers
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.