Every business we work with is sitting on data it can’t get at.
The system knows which customers are late payers, which jobs lose money, which engineer’s callbacks keep coming back, and what stock has been sat there for two years. Getting any of it out means asking someone to run a query, exporting to Excel, and reformatting it — every Monday, by hand.
You don’t need a business intelligence programme for that. You need the numbers out, correctly, without anyone’s morning going into it. ☎
What’s usually wrong
The reports are exports. Somebody runs a query, pastes it into Excel, adds the formatting and the totals, and emails it round. Every week. It takes half a day and it’s out of date by the time it lands.
Nobody trusts the numbers. Two reports give different answers to the same question, so people quietly keep their own spreadsheet instead, and now there are four versions of the truth.
The reports were written years ago by someone who’s gone, in a tool nobody can open, against a data structure that’s changed twice since.
You can see what happened, but not what’s happening. Month-end is fine. Today is a phone call.
The questions people actually ask aren’t answerable without somebody writing SQL — so they stop asking.
What we build
[IMG-1] — Two things side by side: a spreadsheet that’s been hand-formatted, and the same information as a proper report. The before-and-after that everyone recognises.
Alt: Manual spreadsheet replaced by an automated report
Operational reports — the ones people run daily to do their jobs. Job lists, outstanding orders, stock levels, overdue accounts, engineer schedules. Accurate, fast, and available without asking anyone.
Management information — margin by job, customer or product. Sales trends. Labour and utilisation. Costs against quotes. The numbers directors ask for, produced the same way every month so they’re comparable.
Dashboards — live, on a browser or a screen on the wall. Today’s jobs, today’s orders, what’s overdue, what’s stuck. The kind of thing that changes what people do by 10am rather than what they discuss at month-end.
Scheduled reports — arriving by email as a PDF or spreadsheet on whatever cycle suits, because a lot of people would genuinely rather have it turn up than go and look for it.
Self-service, within reason — giving people a safe way to answer their own questions, so the answer to “can you pull me a list of…” stops being a two-day wait.
Exception reporting — often the most valuable of the lot. Not a report you read, but an alert when something’s wrong: a job with no completion, an invoice unsent, stock below minimum, a price that’s changed. → integration and APIs
Which tools, honestly
Power BI where it fits, and it often does — particularly if you’re already on Microsoft 365. Worth knowing it’s licensed per user per month, which for a thirty-person business is a real ongoing cost that should be in the decision rather than discovered afterwards.
SQL Server Reporting Services where it’s already there and working. It’s unfashionable and it’s fine.
Reports built into your own system, so people run them where they already work instead of learning another application. For a lot of businesses this is the right answer and nobody offers it.
Excel, where Excel is genuinely the right tool — a live connection to real data, refreshed on open, rather than a paste of last week’s export. Finance teams live in Excel and there’s no sense fighting that. The problem was never Excel; it was the copy and paste.
Reports nobody can maintain any more
A specific and very common problem: the reporting works, but it was built in Crystal Reports, or an old version of Access, or a reporting tool the supplier no longer sells, and the person who understood it has gone.
We take those on. Understand what they do, document them, keep them running while you decide, and rebuild them properly when it’s worth it — usually a few at a time, starting with the ones people actually use.
Reports are only as good as the data
If two customers are in the system three times each under slightly different names, no reporting tool is going to give you a correct customer count.
Most reporting projects turn up data problems in the first week. Duplicates, blanks, free-text where there should have been a list, and the field somebody started using for something else in 2018. We’d rather find that early and tell you than build a beautiful dashboard on top of it.
You probably don’t need a data warehouse
If you’ve got one main system and a few things around it, you don’t need a warehouse, a lakehouse, an ETL platform or a BI strategy. You need your data modelled sensibly, a handful of well-written queries, and somewhere to look at them.
Where a business genuinely has several systems that need bringing together, we’ll build the layer that does it — and we’ll tell you when you’ve reached that point. But it’s a lot further away than most people are told.
The other half of the job is knowing what not to build. A dashboard with forty numbers on it gets looked at twice. One with the four that matter gets looked at every morning.
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Case studies
Aire Valley Catering: four mobile apps, an Access business system, and engineers with no signal
Engineers working on customer sites across the UK can't count on having a signal, and the job still has to be recorded. Four production apps across both app stores, an Access and SQL Server business system behind them, and a roadmap that keeps offline working rather than trading it away.
View case study →Recovering audit and customer data across multiple corrupt SQL databases
Several customer databases became damaged and wouldn't open, putting audit records, operational data and customer information at risk of permanent loss. A structured recovery programme rebuilt usable datasets from the corrupt files and returned multiple customer systems to service.
View case study →ACC Worldwide: a faster SQL Server platform, noticed on day one
A business-critical system was working but slow, and staff felt it every day. Work on the SQL Server environment behind it delivered an immediate speed increase, and left ACC's own IT team with the logging and monitoring tools to keep developing it.
View case study →Which report does somebody build by hand?
Tell us what gets exported into Excel every week and what happens to it afterwards. That's almost always the first thing worth automating — and it's usually quicker than people expect.
Send us the details → How we work →