Microsoft Power BI

Your figures, readable at a glance. In three days.

Your sources connected, a model, reports and training for your teams. Our smallest projects fit in three to ten days, and your teams leave able to evolve their reports without us.

3 d

to move from manual extracts to reporting that runs on its own

Our smallest delivered project · sources, model, reports, training

Length of a standard project: 3-10 d
Connectable sources: +200
Projects delivered since 2019: 100+
Expert consultants: 11

What we deliver

What a report we deliver looks like

The essential is read in three seconds, the context in thirty, the detail in three hundred. The key figure carries its variance to budget, the trend frames it, and a single accent colour marks the value that calls for a decision.

A mock-up, not a client screenshot. The figures are fictional and rounded. What is real is the layout we apply: the figure that decides, top left, with its variance to budget, the trend beside it, the detail below, and a single accent colour placed on the value that calls for a decision.

A real report

Ten pages you can handle right now

Nounours & Neurones makes toys. The company is invented for the demonstration, and so is the data. The way of working is not. The report is live: filters, cross navigation, drill down to the order line.

Executive cockpit of the Nounours & Neurones Power BI report: five indicators against budget and last year, a waterfall of how the result forms, and revenue by product range. — The report is live and can be handled: filters, cross navigation, drill down to the order line. This is the format we deliver, with invented figures in place of yours.

Executive cockpitFive indicators against budget and against last year, then a waterfall showing how the result forms. In one screen, the board sees where the revenue comes from and where it is lost.
Free explorationA decomposition tree where margin is dug into by range, channel, site, item or country, without knowing in advance what you are looking for. This is where the report stops being a dashboard and becomes an instrument of enquiry.
Order detailThe order line, reached from any visual on the pages before it. An aggregated figure stays checkable right down to its source.
ProductionLine yield, scrap and availability. Overall equipment effectiveness breaks down to the line that is pulling it down.

Nounours & Neurones has never sold a single teddy bear: the company is invented, so are its factories, and its finance director sleeps very well. The report, on the other hand, looks a great deal like the ones we deliver: the same reading rules, the same layout decisions, the same drill down to the order line. Only the figures were replaced by its own.

What changes

A table is scanned. A report is understood.

The same figures, read in a second

On the left, every row has to be read to find the month that dips. On the right, it is seen without reading. That is the whole work of a well-designed report.

What it does well

What Power BI does better than anything else

Power BI strengths
	What it changes day to day
Visualisation	Turning raw figures into information readable at a glance, without going through a developer.
Sharing	Giving the whole team access to the same figures through a web interface, instead of sending files that get lost.
Exploration	Clicking inside a visual to understand where a variance comes from, instead of asking for another extract and waiting two days.

What makes the difference

What we check before quoting

Power BI limits
	What we do about it
Volumes and source technology	Performance depends heavily on what sits behind. A slow ERP or a badly indexed database does not become fast because Power BI is put in front of it.
Complex business rules	Power BI is not made to carry elaborate business logic. When a rule becomes serious it has to live upstream, otherwise it is recoded in every report and the versions diverge.
A heterogeneous information system	The more numerous and different the sources, the more expensive the build becomes. That is the tipping point towards a real data platform.

The trade-off

When Power BI is enough, and when Fabric is needed

We gave this question a page of its own: the three signals that justify the move. Here is the summary.

A Power BI only architecture, dataflows, models and reports, works very well up to a point. Here is what it brings, and what it ends up costing.

Power BI on its own: strengths and weaknesses
	Power BI alone	With Microsoft Fabric
Consistency of the figures	One business model can serve several reports, as long as the discipline holds.	Business rules are centralised upstream: they can no longer diverge.
Refresh	Dataflows and models refresh at different moments, within a limit of eight refreshes a day on a Pro licence.	A chain orchestrated end to end, with no imposed asynchrony.
Diagnosis	When a link breaks, finding which one takes experience and time.	Monitoring and lineage built into the platform.
Governance	Risk of drift as dataflows and datasets multiply with no naming standard and no owner.	Git versioning, deployment pipelines, explicit ownership.
Setup cost	Low. A standard project fits in 3 to 10 days.	Higher, and justified only beyond a certain level of complexity.

Our standard projects

What a three to ten day project looks like

This is our most frequent format, and the most underrated on the market. In one or two weeks, a team moves from manual extracts to reporting that runs on its own.

Contents of a standard Power BI project
Step	Deliverable
Connection	The source wired in: Sage 100, Sage 1000, Salesforce, Business Central, Dynamics NAV, Lucca, Kinnovis, M-Files, Harvest, a SQL database or bespoke line-of-business software.
Preparation	A reusable dataflow: preparation is done once, in the right place, rather than copied into every report.
Modelling	A semantic model with its relationships and its measures, the part that decides whether your figures will be right.
Reporting	Reports designed to be read, not to impress in a demonstration.
Handover	Training for your teams, so that they evolve the reports without us.

Frequently asked

What people ask us most

When is Power BI on its own genuinely enough?

When your sources are few, stable and clean, and the calculation rules stay simple. One ERP, one line-of-business database, a handful of shared indicators: Power BI alone does the job very well, goes in within days and costs little. Adding a data platform at that stage would be over-equipping the need.

At what point should we move to Microsoft Fabric?

Three signals, and one is enough. First, two departments produce different figures for the same question, because each report has recoded its own definition. Second, refreshes no longer keep up: dataflows and models update at different moments, and nobody knows which version is on screen. Third, nobody can diagnose the chain any more when a link breaks.

How long does a Power BI project take?

Our small projects run from 3 to 10 days: sources connected, dataflow, model, reports and user training. A wider project, with several sources or business rules to arbitrate, runs longer, and beyond a certain threshold the question becomes one of a data platform rather than one more report.

Which sources do you connect to Power BI?

Sage 100, Sage 1000, Salesforce, Business Central, Dynamics NAV, Lucca, Kinnovis, M-Files, Harvest, along with SQL databases and bespoke line-of-business software. In most cases the connection is the easy part: the real work is deciding what each figure means.

Do you train the teams on Power BI?

Yes, and it is included in our projects rather than sold separately. The goal is that your teams can evolve their reports without calling us back for every change. A client who depends on their integrator to change a colour is a client badly served.

What happens to our existing Power BI reports?

We take them over rather than starting again. An existing report holds business rules nobody has documented anywhere else: throwing it away would lose that knowledge. We analyse them, extract the business logic, then put it back at the right level, in a shared model rather than in each report.

Two hours to find out what you actually need.

Eleven expert consultantsSaint-Priest, near Lyon, France

A scoping workshop with a certified consultant, without commitment. We look at your sources and your indicators, and we tell you straight whether your need fits in three days or calls for more.

Request a scoping workshop

Scoping workshop · 2 hours · free