Custom dashboards and MI reporting for your business

Before the dashboard: agree what each KPI means

Most reporting arguments are not about charts. They are about definitions. Sales count an order when it is placed, finance when it is invoiced, and the warehouse when it ships, so three people bring three different numbers to the same meeting.

Before anything is built, each KPI gets a short written definition that the people who use it sign off. For every indicator we write down:

• The exact definition, including what is excluded: credit notes, internal transfers, cancelled orders.
• The source system that holds the master figure, and which one wins when two disagree.
• How fresh it needs to be: once a day is enough for most MI reporting; stock or dispatch may need it every few minutes.
• Who owns it and who is allowed to see it.
• The range that should trigger an alert, if any.

Power BI, Looker Studio or a custom dashboard

Building is not always the answer. If your data already sits in Microsoft 365 or Google tools and someone in-house is comfortable with a BI tool, start there. We will say so on the first call.

In November 2026 Microsoft's UK page lists Power BI Pro at £10.80 per user per month and Premium Per User at £18.50, both paid yearly and excluding VAT. The free account cannot share reports. On Pro, Microsoft limits a semantic model to eight scheduled refreshes a day (48 on Premium Per User), and data held on your own servers needs a gateway before it can refresh. Google says Looker Studio is available at no charge for creators and report viewers, with a paid Pro tier priced per user per project.

A bespoke reporting dashboard starts to make sense when licences, connectors or refresh limits get in the way of what you need:

What sits behind an MI dashboard that updates itself and alerts you

The screen is the easy part. Most of the work is the data layer underneath: connections to each source, a database where the figures are cleaned and joined, and scheduled jobs that keep it current. Where the source is Sage 200, Business Central, Xero or your CRM, that is the same work as our ERP integration services.

Before go-live, the dashboard runs alongside your current Monday report until both give the same figures. Only then does anyone stop building the report by hand.

On top of that data, a KPI dashboard for the business earns its keep when it changes what people do that day, not just what they look at:

• Alerts by email or Teams when margin, stock cover or overdue debt goes out of range, sent to the person who can act.
• Drill-down from the total to the customer, the branch and the individual order.
• Actions from the screen: chase an invoice, reorder a line or assign a follow-up without opening another system.
• Views per role, so each manager sees their area and the board sees the whole picture.
• Layouts for a phone or a warehouse screen, not just a desktop.

What shapes the price and timescale

Two dashboards with the same number of charts can involve very different amounts of work. The guide how much custom software costs explains how a price is built and gives market reference figures. The factors that weigh most:

• How many sources there are and how good their APIs are.
• The state of the data: duplicate customers, product codes that differ between systems, gaps in history.
• How fresh the figures must be: daily is simpler than near real time.
• Permissions: who sees which branch, region or customer.
• External users, such as customers or franchisees, who need their own secure access.

How we would build your dashboard

A distributor with three warehouses could start with one sales and stock view for the board, check it against the existing report, and add alerts and branch views once the figures are trusted. You see it working with your own data at every demo, under one fixed price per project. The method is on our page about fixed price software development.