Dashboards Your Team
Actually Opens
If reporting still runs through a Friday spreadsheet and a BI tool nobody opens, we build the dashboard the business actually needs, on your data, with no per-user licence on top.
Days
TO FIRST USABLE VERSION
No per-seat fees
UNLIMITED VIEWERS
Yours
CODE, DATA AND IP
Stop renting reports you don't read.
Power BI Pro is $14 per user/month when paid yearly. Tableau's Standard Creator licence is $75 per user/month, billed annually. Looker lists platform pricing and user pricing separately, with one, two and three-year annual subscriptions. Tool cost isn't the only problem, but it matters when the dashboard becomes another login.
In 2019 Gartner predicted that through 2022 only 20% of analytic insights would deliver business outcomes. A 2022 Gartner survey of 566 data and analytics leaders found 44% saying their teams were effective in providing value.
A useful dashboard earns its keep differently: fewer generic reports, clearer ownership, one view built around the decision.
TODAY'S REPORTING
- Per-seat licences that creep every renewal
- Friday spreadsheet rebuilt by hand each week
- Numbers from Xero, Stripe and the CRM that disagree
- A consultant who built it, left, and took the logic with them
- Dashboards nobody opens between board meetings
BESPOKE DASHBOARD
- Fixed cost, no per-user fees
- Numbers update themselves overnight
- One reconciled view across every system
- Rules in code, named, tested, in version control
- Built for the role, not for the tool's idea of a chart
A dashboard that gets used has the same five parts.
When a dashboard gets ignored, we check these five parts first. The colour palette comes later.
The question
One named decision per dashboard. "Do we hire next month?" "Which job is losing money?" If the dashboard doesn't answer one, it gets closed.
The pipes
Xero, HubSpot, Stripe, Shopify, your job tracker, your timesheets. Pulled overnight into one warehouse, reconciled, deduped.
The model
"Revenue", "active customer", "gross margin", defined once. Same number in the board pack, the sales meeting and the accountant's email.
The view
Built for the role that opens it. The MD sees three numbers and a trend. Ops sees the job board. Finance gets the cash position. Nobody sees everything.
The alert
The dashboard pings you when something matters. Margin drops below threshold, a customer goes quiet, cash dips. You don't need to log in to find out.
Where we come in.
We've built dashboards for engineering firms, recruiters, manufacturers, ecommerce brands and professional-services teams. Same pattern every time: pick the decision, plumb the data, model it once, build a view per role.
Fixed-scope phases, working software, you own the lot. No twelve-month consulting engagement, no per-seat invoices forever.
BOOK A DATA REVIEWData review
A half-day session with you and whoever runs the spreadsheet. We list the decisions you're trying to make, the systems holding the data, and the three dashboards worth building first. Scope and price up front, no slide decks.
Plumb the data
We connect Xero, HubSpot, Stripe, Shopify, your job tracker, your warehouse system, your timesheets, whichever apply. Data lands in your own warehouse (BigQuery, Postgres or Snowflake), refreshed overnight or every few minutes if you need it live.
Model it once
"Revenue", "active customer", "gross margin", "utilisation" get defined in code (dbt or a semantic layer) and reviewed with you. Every dashboard, board pack and email after that reads from the same definitions. The argument about whose number is right ends here.
Launch the views
Built on Metabase, Evidence.dev, Lightdash, Cube or a hand-rolled Laravel and Livewire app, whichever fits your stack and your team. Alerts wired to Slack or email. You can carry on adding views without us.
No tribal allegiance to one tool.
We pick the lightest stack that fits the job. Sometimes that's self-hosted Metabase. Sometimes it's a hand-built Laravel app because the dashboard has to write back to your operational systems. We tell you which, and why.
Metabase, Lightdash, Evidence, Superset
Each has an open-source route we can self-host. Metabase says it's trusted by 90,000+ companies. We self-host or run cloud, whichever fits the job.
dbt and Cube
Metric definitions live in version-controlled code. Every chart, every export, every AI agent reading the data uses the same numbers. No more "well, mine says..." in the meeting.
Postgres, BigQuery, Snowflake
We start with managed Postgres when it fits, then scale up only when the data needs it. Not because the brochure said so.
Laravel + Livewire
When the dashboard needs to be inside your own product, branded, multi-tenant, or able to trigger workflows, we build it bespoke. Same team, same hosting, same login as the rest of your software.
Three reasons they end up unused.
In February 2024, Gartner predicted that 80% of data and analytics governance initiatives will fail by 2027 because they aren't tied to a real or manufactured crisis. In SME terms, the failure usually looks like this.
Nobody owns it.
An external agency built it, charged the bill, and left. Six months later a field changes upstream and the chart silently lies. The first person to spot the bad number stops trusting the dashboard. Then everyone does.
It answers nothing in particular.
Twenty charts, every metric the tool could generate, no named decision. The MD opens it once and never again because nothing on the screen tells them what to do next.
The numbers don't reconcile.
CRM says one revenue figure, Xero says another, the dashboard splits the difference. By the third board meeting somebody's rebuilt the Friday spreadsheet on the side and the dashboard is an expensive museum piece.
Built for UK reality.
Your data stays inside UK or EU jurisdictions if you want it to. Access is logged. Personal data is handled against UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018. None of this is glamorous. All of it matters when somebody asks.
UK GDPR and DPA 2018
Role-based access, audit trail, retention rules, breach process. The ICO's 72-hour window for reportable personal data breaches is built into how we set up alerting.
Companies House and HMRC ready
Companies House requires annual accounts from UK companies and says accounts filing will move to commercial software in future. HMRC's Making Tax Digital for Income Tax started in April 2026 for sole traders and landlords above the £50,000 threshold. If the dashboard feeds finance, the definitions need to match what gets filed.
Hosted where you want
UK or EU regions on AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, Hetzner or DigitalOcean. If you have FCA obligations, NHS procurement rules or another sector requirement with views on where data lives, tell us in the review and we'll work to it.
The ones we get asked first.
Can't we just use Power BI or Tableau?
You can, and for some teams it's the right call. The trade is per-user licences forever, a tool your team has to learn, and definitions that can drift if nobody owns them. We'll tell you when it's the right answer.
How long does it take?
First usable dashboard in days for most SMEs. That's data review, pipes, model and one role-specific view. New views and metrics get added in days after that.
How much does it cost?
Fixed price per phase. We price the first phase after the data review, before we start building. No per-viewer fees, no surprise platform bill buried underneath the work.
What if our data is a mess?
It usually is. Duplicates in the CRM, statuses that mean different things to different people, the customer who's listed three times. That's the modelling step. We clean it as we load it, and write the rules down so it stays clean.
Who owns it after?
You do. Source code, warehouse, dbt models, dashboards. In your accounts, on your hosting, in a repo with your team in it. We can keep maintaining it on a retainer or hand it over to your in-house developer. No lock-in.
Can it talk to AI?
Yes. Once the metrics live in a semantic layer, an LLM can be wired to answer "how did we do last month?" in plain English from signed-off definitions. We add that when you want it.
What if the team won't use it?
That's why step one is naming the decision. If nobody can name the question a dashboard answers, we don't build it. And we wire alerts so the dashboard comes to people, not the other way round.
Know what the business is doing this week?
Book a thirty-minute data review. Bring the Friday spreadsheet, the Power BI you regret, and the three questions you wish you could answer without asking anyone. You'll come away with a clear view of what to build first and what to leave alone.