Most businesses we work with don't have a Power BI problem — they have a data problem that Power BI is supposed to fix. Sales sit in one system, finance in another, operations in a spreadsheet, marketing in a third tool. Every report says something slightly different, every leadership meeting starts with five minutes of arguing about whose number is right, and the dashboard somebody built last year stopped being trusted as soon as the first column of figures looked wrong.
Power BI consulting, done well, fixes that — but only if the work happens in the right order. Build the data model first, then the measures, then the visuals. Most of the slow, untrusted Power BI reports we get called in to rescue were built the other way round.
Our Power BI consultancy services
Data modelling and semantic layers
The single biggest factor in whether a Power BI deployment succeeds is the quality of the data model underneath it. We design proper star schemas, define the relationships explicitly, and build a semantic layer where your business terms ("revenue", "active customer", "gross margin") have one definition that every report respects. That's how you stop two dashboards disagreeing about the same number.
Dashboard and report design
We build dashboards for the people who'll actually look at them. That means understanding which decisions a report is meant to support, designing the page around those decisions, and ruthlessly cutting visuals that look impressive but don't change what anyone does on Monday morning. Clean, fast, and actually useful.
Power Query and DAX optimisation
Most slow Power BI reports are slow because of Power Query that's doing too much work at refresh time, or DAX measures that recompute the same thing fifty times per visual. We rewrite the heavy parts, push computation back into the data warehouse where it belongs, and turn 30-second renders into half-second renders.
Refresh pipelines and gateway setup
Reports are only as fresh as the data behind them. We design and configure the refresh schedule, the on-premises data gateway where needed, the incremental refresh policies, and the alerting that tells your team if a refresh ever fails — not the dashboard quietly serving stale numbers for a fortnight.
Power BI report rescues
Inherited a Power BI workspace from a previous consultancy or a member of staff who's left, and nobody knows quite how it works any more? We audit what's there, document the data model, fix the worst of the performance and reliability problems, and bring it back under control without rebuilding from scratch.
How we run a Power BI engagement
We always start with a short discovery — typically a few days. We sit with the people who currently make decisions from your data (or wish they could), find out which questions they actually want answered, and look at the source systems the data needs to come from. Out of that, you get a written design covering the data model, the dashboards we'll build, what the refresh pipeline will look like, and a fixed price for the build itself.
Then we build in two-week iterations, usually starting with the most-used dashboard so leadership has something genuinely useful in their hands within a few weeks rather than waiting for the whole project to finish. You see real reports running on real data early, and you get to steer the build as your priorities change.
Beyond Power BI: the data underneath
For smaller businesses, Power BI can sit directly on top of your operational systems. As you grow, that gets slow and fragile, and the right answer is usually a proper analytics warehouse — Microsoft Fabric, Azure SQL, BigQuery or Snowflake — with the dashboards layered on top. We're equally happy designing the warehouse and the ELT pipelines that feed it, so the whole reporting stack stays consistent and performant as the business grows.
Training and handover so you're not dependent on us
Every Power BI engagement ends with structured training for the people in your business who will own the reports day-to-day — typically a finance, operations or commercial team. We document the data model in plain language, write naming conventions everyone can follow, and walk your team through how to add a new measure, a new visual or a whole new page without breaking anything else. Most clients keep us on a small monthly support plan after handover; others go entirely self-sufficient. Both are fine outcomes.
UK-based Power BI consultants you can actually talk to
We're a small senior team based in Bolton, working with UK businesses across Greater Manchester, the North West and the wider UK. The Power BI consultant who scopes your project is the same one building the data model and the dashboards — no junior handoffs, no offshore contractors, no day-rate body-shopping. You get one number to call and one person who knows your reports inside out.
If you've spent too long arguing about whose number is right, or you know there's value buried in your data that nobody is pulling out, drop us a short brief through the contact form. We'll come back within one working day with an honest first take on what good Power BI reporting could look like for your business.