Dashboards built on your real numbers — not a vendor's monthly invoice.
For the owners, ops leads, and finance folks still dragging CSVs into Excel every Monday. Dashboards that tie out, refresh overnight, and live in the tools you already pay for — not a vendor's monthly invoice. From $250.
What every dashboard gets by default.
Not upsells — the floor.
- Numbers that tie out
- Refreshes that don't break
- Each person sees only their data
- Works on phone + laptop
- Auto-emailed PDFs on a schedule
- You own it, not me
How I build these.
A real data model underneath, the right tool for each job, and zero vendor lock-in.
Star schema, not flat sheets
Facts and dimensions, modeled properly. That's why your filters stay fast and your totals stay right when the data triples.
DAX where it earns its keep
Measures for the things that have to be dynamic. SQL views and ETL for the heavy lifting upstream — so the report stays light.
RDL for print and schedule
Paginated reports for anything that has to be pixel-perfect on a page or land in someone's inbox at 7am Monday. Power BI for exploration, RDL for delivery.
In-house over vendor lock-in
Built in your Microsoft tenant on tools you already pay for. No per-seat reporting tax, no "export-as-CSV-and-pray" when you want to leave.
Replaced $40K+/yr in paid vendor reporting.
Took a stack of vendor dashboards — Tableau seats, staffing-industry portal fees, a paid BI tool nobody loved — and rebuilt the whole thing in Power BI + Fabric. Same data, faster, theirs to own. That recurring spend is gone.
Three ways to start. Pick the shape that fits.
Built in your tenant, owned by you, includes the baseline above. Fixed one-page quote after a discovery call and a quick look at your data.
Dashboard
- Timeline
- 1–2 weeks
- Scope
- 1 dashboard, 2–4 pages
- Languages
- English
- One Power BI dashboard, 2–4 pages
- Connect to one source — SQL, Excel, SharePoint, or a SaaS API
- Star-schema model + core DAX measures
- Scheduled refresh (daily or hourly)
Stack
- Timeline
- 3–6 weeks
- Scope
- 3–6 dashboards, shared model
- Languages
- English + 1
- Everything in Dashboard
- 3–6 dashboards on a shared semantic model
- Multiple sources joined — ERP + CRM + spreadsheets
- Row-level security by role, region, or team
Platform
- Timeline
- 6–12 weeks
- Scope
- Full Fabric build / embedded
- Languages
- Multi-language ready
- Everything in Stack
- Microsoft Fabric — OneLake, lakehouse, pipelines
- Custom ETL from ERP/ATS/CRM (SAP, NetSuite, Dynamics, Bullhorn, Salesforce, etc.)
- BigQuery or Synapse for heavy analytical workloads
Extras, when you need them.
Slot onto any package, or add later.
Paginated report (RDL)
$500–$2K eachPrint-ready PDF on a schedule — invoices, statements, board decks, weekly ops digests. Built in Report Builder, delivered by email or SharePoint.
Embedded dashboard
$1.5K–$5KDrop a Power BI report into your own web app or client portal with secure tokens. Your customers see their data, not yours.
AI Q&A over your data
$1K–$3KNatural-language questions against your model — "what was East region revenue last quarter?" Powered by Power BI Q&A or a Copilot wiring.
Data-quality monitoring
$800–$2KAutomated checks on row counts, nulls, freshness, and reconciliation — you get the alert before the CFO does.
Team training session
$400–$800Two hours, your team, your dashboards. They leave knowing how to filter, drill, export, and build their own simple visuals.
Monthly retainer
$300–$1K / moNew measures, new visuals, refresh babysitting, source changes, "can we add this one chart" — bundled into a predictable monthly.
How a data project actually goes.
A call, a look at your data, then a build that ties out and stays up.
20-minute discovery call
I ask what decisions the dashboard needs to support and where the data lives today. You ask whatever you want. No deck.
Data audit + scoped quote
Quick look at your sources — how clean, how connected, how often they update. Within 48 hours you get a fixed quote, scope, and timeline. If your data is a mess, I'll say so and tell you what to fix first.
Model + dashboard build
Star schema first, then measures, then visuals. Progress links along the way so you're reviewing real numbers, not mockups. Reconciliation against source is part of the work, not an afterthought.
Launch + RLS + handoff
We publish to your workspace, set up row-level security, schedule refreshes, and walk your team through editing. Repo, model, and credentials live in your tenant.
Things people usually ask.
Power BI, almost always — especially if you're already on Microsoft 365. Same license you're paying for, deeper modeling, way cheaper at SMB scale. Tableau is great if you've already invested in it; Looker makes sense at Google-shop enterprise scale. For 95% of small businesses, Power BI wins on cost and capability.
Yes. Most of my builds start there. Excel and SharePoint are first-class sources in Power BI, and for vendor portals there's almost always an export, an API, or a scheduled CSV we can hook into. Step one is just looking at what you've got.
For most SMBs: Power BI Pro at ~$10/user/month for the people building and viewing reports — often already included in your Microsoft 365 plan. For larger or embedded scenarios, Power BI Premium or Fabric capacity starts around $260/month and replaces per-user fees. I'll sanity-check your current licensing on the call so you don't double-pay.
Pro datasets refresh up to 8x/day on a schedule. Premium/Fabric goes to 48x/day or near-real-time via DirectQuery and streaming. Most clients land at hourly for ops dashboards and nightly for finance — truly real-time is rarely worth the cost.
Each user is mapped to a role (rep, manager, region, entity), and the model filters rows based on who's logged in. The same dashboard URL shows different data to different people, automatically. No duplicating reports per team.
Tell me what decisions the dashboard needs to drive. I'll tell you what it takes to build it.
First calls run about 20 minutes. You'll leave with a clearer plan — a quote, a recommendation, or an honest "your data isn't ready yet, here's what to do first." All three happen.