Power BI / Tableau dashboards
One screen that answers the questions you currently rebuild a spreadsheet to answer.
A dashboard connects to your data and refreshes itself, so the question you currently rebuild a spreadsheet to answer is simply already answered.
Power BI is Microsoft's, and it is usually the pragmatic choice if you are already on Microsoft 365 — the licensing is often already paid for. Tableau is stronger for open-ended exploration and costs more. For most SMEs the tool is the least important decision.
The important decision is what question it answers. A dashboard built without a specific decision behind it becomes wallpaper within a month — everyone admires it at the demo and nobody opens it in week three.
Every Monday someone spends half a day pulling three exports, pasting them into a template, fixing the formulas that broke, and emailing a PDF. By Wednesday the numbers are stale and two people are quoting different figures in the same meeting.
The same view, refreshed overnight, on a link anyone can open. Monday morning is a five-minute look instead of half a day, and there is one set of numbers everybody sees.
How we actually build it
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01
We start from a decision, not a chart
"Which branch is underperforming and should I visit it" is a decision. "Show me sales" is wallpaper.
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02
We connect to the source
Directly where possible, so nobody is exporting anything by hand. If the data needs cleaning first, that is a pipeline job — and we will say so.
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03
We design for a glance
The number that matters, large, with whether it is up or down. Detail underneath for the people who want it.
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04
We set the refresh and walk away
Overnight is enough for most SMEs. Real-time is usually vanity and always costs more.
- Someone rebuilds the same report every week from the same exports
- Different people quote different numbers for the same thing
- You want yesterday's figures this morning, not next Tuesday
- The underlying data is inconsistent. A dashboard makes bad data look authoritative
- Nobody has said what decision it supports — start there instead
- One person needs one number once a month. An email will do
- Access to the underlying data
- One person who can confirm the definitions — what counts as a "sale"?
- A Power BI licence if you go that way
1–2 weeks if the data is clean. Add 2–3 if it is not.
What people ask about this
Do I need to buy Power BI?
Often you already have it inside Microsoft 365 Business. We will check before anyone buys anything.
Can it show on a TV in the office?
Yes, and it works well — but pick the two or three numbers a team can actually influence. A wall of charts gets ignored just as fast as a PDF.
Often paired with
Would this work for you?
The first call is free, and we will say plainly if this is the wrong tool for your problem.
Book a free call