Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence

Two departments, two numbers, one meeting spent arguing about which is real.

Most organisations do not lack reporting. They lack agreement. We build the governed metric layer and the dashboards on top of it so that revenue, margin and churn mean the same thing in every room.

Analyst reviewing business performance dashboards and charts
Fig. 01 — One definition per metric, everywhere it appears

1

definition

Per metric, versioned and owned

−73%

reporting effort

Manual preparation hours removed

9 days

faster close

Typical improvement in month-end reporting

The Story

The board pack with three different revenue figures.

We were asked to review a board pack before a funding round. Revenue appeared three times, in three sections, with three different values. Each was defensible — one recognised on invoice, one on cash, one including a subsidiary consolidated differently — and each had been produced by a competent person in a separate spreadsheet.

The problem was not arithmetic. It was that no definition existed anywhere except inside individual analysts' formulas. Every report was a fresh interpretation, and the interpretations diverged quietly until they collided in a document that mattered.

We built a semantic layer where each metric is defined once, in version-controlled code, tested in the pipeline and reused by every dashboard and model downstream. Month-end reporting went from a fortnight of assembly to a governed process, and the arguing stopped. One truth, tested, with a name against it.

We stopped starting meetings by reconciling numbers and started them by deciding things.

Group Financial Controller Hospitality group, Nepal
Capabilities

Reporting that people trust enough to act on.

A dashboard nobody believes is worse than no dashboard, because it consumes attention and produces suspicion.

Foundation

Semantic & metric layer

Every core metric defined once in code, tested, documented and owned, so downstream reports cannot quietly disagree with each other.

Executive

Executive & board reporting

Board-grade packs assembled automatically from governed data, with commentary structure, variance analysis and drill-through to source.

Operations

Operational dashboards

The live views that frontline managers actually use: pipeline, occupancy, queue, generation, collections, utilisation, service levels.

Finance

Financial & margin analytics

Unit economics, cost to serve, product and customer profitability, and the margin view that pricing decisions genuinely require.

Self-service

Governed self-service

Certified datasets and templates so analysts across the business can answer their own questions without inventing new versions of the truth.

Advanced

Forecasting & scenario analysis

Forward-looking views — demand, cash, occupancy, staffing — with scenario modelling that connects to the same governed definitions.

Fig. 02 — Variance explained before the meeting, not during itGoverned definitions · automated assembly · drill-through
Close-up of performance charts under review
Business Outcomes

What agreement on the numbers is worth.

Each of these is written into the engagement as a number with an owner, a baseline and a review date.

OUTCOME 01

Decisions get made sooner

Removing the reconciliation ritual from every meeting returns hours to the most expensive people in the organisation and shortens the path from question to decision.

OUTCOME 02

Reporting stops consuming analysts

When assembly is automated, analytics teams move from producing reports to producing insight. Clients typically recover the majority of a full-time role per reporting cycle.

OUTCOME 03

AI becomes possible

Predictive work needs consistent historical definitions. Clients who build this layer first find their subsequent AI programmes materially faster and cheaper to deliver.

What You Receive

A reporting layer with owners and tests.

  • Documented metric definitions in version control with named owners
  • Tested transformation pipelines feeding certified datasets
  • Executive, operational and financial dashboards in your BI tool
  • Automated distribution of scheduled reporting and board packs
  • Data quality monitoring with alerting before anyone sees a wrong number
  • Analyst training so your team extends the layer without us
Technology & Method

The engineering underneath.

Proof

Numbers from work already in production.

Measured against the baseline agreed with the client before the engagement started.

9 days

Faster month-end close

Automated assembly on governed data

−73%

Manual reporting hours

Across finance and operations teams

3 → 1

Revenue definitions

In a board pack, before and after

Questions

What finance and analytics leaders ask.

  • 01. We already have dashboards nobody uses. Why would this be different?
    Usually because the existing ones answer questions nobody was asking, or report numbers people do not trust. We start by asking which decisions need support, then build only what serves them.
  • 02. Which BI tool should we use?
    Largely whichever your team already knows. The value sits in the governed layer beneath, which is tool-agnostic on purpose — you can change visualisation tools later without rebuilding the definitions.
  • 03. Can you work with our finance team's spreadsheets?
    Yes, and we treat them as the specification. Those spreadsheets usually encode years of hard-won business logic, and our job is to move that logic into a tested, governed layer rather than to discard it.
  • 04. How long before we see something?
    First governed dashboards typically land in six to ten weeks, starting with the metrics attached to the most consequential decision rather than attempting complete coverage.
Related

Where to go next.

01 / 03

Data & AI Engineering

The foundation that makes models trustworthy.

Continue reading
02 / 03

Decision Intelligence

The next best action for every moment.

Continue reading
03 / 03

Technology Consulting

Strategy that survives contact.

Continue reading
Next Step

Bring us your last board pack. We will find the numbers that disagree.

The assessment reviews your current reporting, identifies conflicting definitions and prices the governed layer against the hours and decisions it would recover.