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Power BI dashboards and reporting

Numbers you can see and trust. Current every morning, down to each figure.

Your systems feed Power BI directly and it updates on its own. The figures are ready before the meeting starts, so the time goes into deciding.

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A Power BI dashboard built by CS Maestro, open in a browser: revenue against target, receivables and order backlog by age, and a column of monthly, year-to-date and prior-year figures.

"The numbers are somewhere in our systems and spreadsheets, but by the time someone pulls them together they’re already out of date, and I’m not sure I can trust them."

Behind every monthly report is someone rebuilding it by hand, and a leadership team waiting on it. When it arrives late and nobody is sure which version is right, decisions wait another month. Some get made on instinct. Once the manual work is gone, the person who built the report gets those days back. The managers and directors making the calls get figures they can act on instantly.

What changes. From the monthly spreadsheet to figures that are ready when you are.

Today

The report is rebuilt by hand from exports and spreadsheets. It reaches managers after the month has moved on, and the meeting starts by questioning the figures.

Daysa month building it by hand
Latearrives after the decision was needed
Uncheckednever traced back to the source
A monthly report spreadsheet named "Monthly report v7 FINAL (2)", with a broken total, a highlighted cell, a note asking which version has the corrected Montreal figures, and tabs named Paste here and Old.

With Power BI

The dashboard reads straight from your systems and refreshes on its own. Every figure is checked against the source before it goes live, and anyone can click into the detail behind a number.

Dailyrefreshed from the source
Checkedagainst the source system
1 clickto the detail behind a figure
A Power BI report comparing revenue against budget by location, with a variance table showing actual, budget and prior year in dollars and percent.

The questions a dashboard answers. In the words you already use.

Are we on target this month?

Revenue against target by month, product, region or salesperson, with margins and the pipeline.

What should we reorder?

Stock levels and slow movers, and when to reorder.

Which clients have stopped buying?

Best and fastest-growing clients, and sales by client over time.

Who owes us money, and for how long?

Receivables by client and age, and the cash coming in and going out.

Where is production slipping?

Output, delays and costs against plan.

How are we doing overall?

A handful of KPIs on one page, read in two minutes.

Start small and grow into it. Standard KPIs first, your own measures when you need them.

Connect

We connect Power BI to the systems you already run. For most smaller businesses that is an accounting system and a few spreadsheets.

Nothing to replace. Your accounting system or ERP stays where it is, and Power BI reads from it.

The spreadsheets that have to stay are connected too, each given a fixed place so nobody pastes into them by hand.

Your team keeps working the way it does today. Only the report stops being built by hand.

An example setup drawn by CS Maestro: an accounting system, an ERP and a sales spreadsheet feeding one Power BI model, which feeds the Overview, Revenue, Receivables and Inventory pages.
Three systems, one model, nothing replaced.

Standard KPIs go live

A standard set of KPIs goes live first: revenue, cash, receivables and inventory. The thinking about which numbers matter is already done.

The pages an owner reads first, starting with revenue against target and receivables by age.

Every figure checked against the source system before the page goes live.

Your team shown how to use it, on your own numbers.

From here, the meeting starts on the figures instead of on whether they are right.

A Power BI report showing receivables by age, days outstanding, cash collected against target, and the overdue accounts by name and age.
Receivables by age, one of the standard pages.

Your own measures

Once the team is using it, we add what is specific to your business: its own measures and data sources.

Your own definitions, such as how you count a margin or an active client, written down so everyone uses the same one.

New sources added when you need them, from a second system to a supplier’s file.

Each addition is built on the same model, so the numbers still agree with each other.

A Power BI report showing revenue by product line as a donut, with a table of revenue, prior year, growth, margin and units for each line.
Revenue and margin by product line, added for this business.

Built to grow

As the company grows, each manager sees only their own numbers. The model moves to a platform that can carry it.

Security by person. A location manager sees their location, and finance sees all of them.

A migration path when the platform underneath changes, with every calculation reconciled against the old one before the switch.

The dashboards your team already knows stay the same while the platform underneath changes.

The same Power BI revenue report seen by two people: the Montreal manager sees Montreal only, and finance sees all six locations, $12.60M in total.
One report; each person sees their own part.

What would you decide if the figures were already there?

Tell us which numbers your meetings wait on. In thirty minutes we will tell you how to have them ready before the meeting starts.

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