Dashboards built on your real numbers — not a vendor's monthly invoice.

For a small or mid-sized business, Power BI almost always — especially if you're already paying for Microsoft 365 (it's included). It's deeper than people realize, and dramatically cheaper than the alternatives at small-business scale. Tableau is great if your team has already invested heavily in it. Looker makes more sense for large companies running on Google Cloud. But for 95% of small businesses, Power BI wins on both cost and capability. We'll confirm what makes sense for your specific setup on the call.

Yes — honestly, most of our builds start exactly there. Spreadsheets in Excel or SharePoint, exports from a vendor's portal, scattered files. Power BI handles Excel and SharePoint natively, and for vendor portals there's almost always either a download button, a scheduled email, or a behind-the-scenes way to pull the data automatically. Step one is just sitting down together and looking at what you've already got — no need to clean it up first.

For most small and mid-sized businesses, Power BI Pro is about $10 per person per month for the folks building and looking at reports — and it's often already included in your Microsoft 365 plan, so the real cost may be $0. For larger setups or scenarios where you embed dashboards inside another app, the next tier (Power BI Premium or Fabric) starts around $260 a month and replaces the per-person fees. We'll sanity-check your current Microsoft licensing on the call so you don't accidentally double-pay for something you're already entitled to.

It depends on which tier of Power BI you're on, but here's the practical answer. The standard tier refreshes data up to 8 times a day on a schedule. Higher tiers go up to 48 times a day, or essentially real-time for things that genuinely need it. Most of our clients land on hourly refreshes for operations dashboards (orders, jobs, tickets) and nightly refreshes for finance reports. Truly real-time data is rarely worth what it costs in our experience — we'll figure out the right cadence together.

Yes — this is one of the most useful features. Each person on your team gets mapped to a role (a rep, a manager, a region, a specific store, etc.), and the dashboard automatically filters what they see based on who's logged in. So a sales rep only sees their own deals, a manager sees their whole team, the owner sees everything — all from the exact same dashboard link. No need to build separate reports for each person or team.

For the technical folks: this is row-level security (RLS) implemented in the data model with DAX filter expressions tied to USERPRINCIPALNAME().