Microsoft Power BI

Empower your decision-making through focused data visualisation, and drive better outcomes for your business from the insight you can unlock. As a Microsoft Power BI Partner, we provide you with a solution to support you in your growing business, and The Power People are the team to help you realise that strategy and deliver the insight you need.

What is Power BI?

Microsoft Power BI, part of Microsoft Power Platform, is a business analytics solution that provides your business with an automated, live, interactive visualisation tool. You can combine many different sources of data, from financial to operational, combined with CRM and marketing data. All that matters is how you want to use it.

When used properly, it can be used to provide important, exception-focused insight, to give you the actionable information your business needs to make decisions to drive better business outcomes.

You will gain better insights on the data held by your business, evolving from traditional historic reporting toward forward-looking visual insight. This will help you discover problems and make early interventions. Resolve key issues in a fully-automated manner at the right time to make a difference.

Power BI gives you the ability to serve business intelligence across your company. It can be distributed via browser or mobile app, Microsoft Teams, or SharePoint, so your team can access the dashboards from anywhere.

As a customer of ours, you can access a FREE set of pre-built Power BI reports!

Take a look today

Benefits of Power BI

Power BI is Microsoft's premier business intelligence and analytics tool, receiving huge investment from Microsoft and continuous improvement for all users. Power BI allows you to evolve beyond traditional reporting into identifying and resolving key issues in your business at the right time.

With this strength as the application's basis, the following benefits of Power BI can be enjoyed:

Challenging subjects become attainable through visualisation of data

Eliminate manual reporting processes
Read-only consumption, no Excel spreadsheets to break!
Combine data from multiple sources and have one unified source of the truth
Automate processes and deliver action-focused interactive views when it matters

Push data alerts and trigger flows through the Power Platform

Features of Power BI

As well as integrating with the Office 365 solutions, Power BI can also connect to the Microsoft Power Platform. Combining Power BI with Power Apps and Power Automate can transform the way you work.

Automate all your daily reporting, have updates sent straight to the inboxes of the people who need them, and receive data alerts through Microsoft Teams based on personalised triggers when key metrics have changed in real-time.

Some of our favourite features of Power BI include:

Completely customisable, tailor-made visualisations that you can share
Data connectors are developed and added every day, adding to an already extensive list
Optimised integration with Microsoft data sources (including SQL) and a myriad of third-party systems
Seamless integration with Office 365 and the Power Platform

Connect to any Power BI dataset from Excel as a single source of truth to explore with the tools you like. Export what you create to PDF, Excel, PowerPoint etc
Inexpensive solution at £7.50 per user per month for a Pro licence

What we love about Power BI

Power BI evolves with you

Invoke Azure Machine Learning models in Power BI, delivering data science to your organisation

Hugely supported by Microsoft

Enjoy monthly feature releases, continuous Microsoft investment, and best-in-class security

Get foresight AND insight

You will no longer need to be reliant on historic reporting delivered weeks in arrears

Scalable as your team grows

Get pipeline management and premium features for enterprise scale

Power BI Use Cases

Power BI is a powerful tool which starts as a blank canvas, on which we can build any data model and design any output. The context of how it’s used in a business is therefore arguably the most important aspect of how it is used valuably.

We've collated some important use cases to demonstrate this, for you to see some of the many capabilities of Power BI, and start to understand what the solution could do in your business scenario.

Heathrow - Airport and passenger management

Manufacturers
Accountancy firms
Legal firms

Our Developed Solutions

Power BI Licensing

The Power BI licence types work in the following way. There are three different Power BI licences:

Power BI Unlicensed
Anyone can use Power BI for free for personal use, i.e. someone not wishing to collaborate with a team. Content cannot be shared by or with this user.

Power BI Pro
As a Pro user, you can read and interact with reports and dashboards produced by other users. You can collaborate and publish content of your own and others. For most use cases in our experience, this licence type is suitable.

Power BI Premium
Power BI Premium is an organisation-level, capacity-based subscription. It provides the functionality of the Pro licence, and a number of additional enterprise-scale features, such as deployment pipelines, and data marts. In an organisation which subscribes to Premium, all employees can view shared Power BI reports for free.

Power BI Premium per user
Enjoy the benefits of Premium, but on a per user cost basis.

There are lots of other features of each Power BI licence type, too many to list here! But we'd love to discuss in more detail with you.

If you're confused by the licensing options for Power BI, book a licensing consultation with us and discuss your requirements.

Licensing Consultation

Our Power BI Offering

If you're interested in Power BI or already using it, but want to take the next step and develop your understanding, why not book in a free of charge discovery call with one of our Power BI consultants?

In the one hour call, our consultant will understand where you are in your analytics journey, your familiarity with the solution, and aim to help you take the next steps to getting the most out of Power BI.

The consultant will arrange a convenient time to call you, then they will get an understanding of the data sources you're working with and what you'd like to achieve from business intelligence and analytics.

Our Discovery Call

Already using Power BI? Talk to us about taking it further

Talk to us today

Our Power BI Experts

Reuben Barry

Reuben is our Power BI Practice Lead. He focuses mainly on data analytics through Power BI and has been working with the solution since 2016.

Jordan Mitchell

Jordan is one of our Analytics Consultants in the Power People team and loves working with Power BI!

Karen Pendlebury

Karen is our Lead Data Analyst and has a strong background in financial services. She has worked alongside data analytical teams since 2015.

Ben Churchill

Ben is one of our Analytics Consultants, who has been working in business intelligence roles since 2016.

Power BI FAQs

Is Power BI part of Microsoft 365?

Yes, but only if you subscribe to the Microsoft 365 E5 plan, which includes a Power BI Pro licence for each of your users. You can read more about Power BI and Microsoft 365 here. You also benefit from the best-in-class business applications that Microsoft provide, for example productivity tools such as Word, Excel, Teams, SharePoint and OneDrive.

What is Power BI Pro?

Power BI Pro gives you the ability to build dashboards in collaboration with others, share them inside and outside of your organisation and access reports that have been shared with you, all via web browser or mobile app. You can read more about Power BI Pro on Microsoft's website here.

Can I use Power BI on mobile?

Yes - Power BI Mobile can be accessed by any of the leading mobile operating systems: iOS, Android and Windows. The interface is clean and simple, giving you a mobile-ready view of your data wherever you are. Read more about Power BI Mobile here on Microsoft's website.

Can Power BI be customised?

Power BI is a blank canvas on which you can build any automated reporting solution. How you choose to build and customise it is completely up to you. Not sure where to start? Our team of Power BI consultants can help you. Once a report is shared, users can dynamically interact with and filter the report according to their needs.

Is Power BI available on-premise?

Yes - Power BI Premium comes with Power BI Report Server, an on-premise solution that gives you the flexibility to move to the cloud when you're ready. You can read more about Power BI Report Server on Microsoft's website here. You have the flexibility to publish reports to the cloud as well, making Report Server the complete solution.

Does Power BI replace Jet Reports or Excel?

We think you should use the right tool for the right job. You may be suffering from the following:

Complicated, manual processes that take lots of time for reports to be produced
You're managing your business using reports which are available weeks in arrears of when you needed the information
Bloated, complex reports which rely on data from multiple sources
Fragile reports which are untrustworthy or prone to breaking

These are all symptoms that can be solved by using Power BI as your solution to automate and control these important processes, to deliver action-focused insight to you at the right time. There are many use cases which don't suffer from these problems, where Jet Reports and Excel fit the bill. Get in touch with our team to discuss your options.

Do I need a data warehouse?

It depends on your circumstances. Power BI is capable of sourcing data directly from systems without the need for a data warehouse and there are many use cases where this is valid. In some scenarios where production systems produce huge volumes of transactional data at high frequency, it can be desirable to introduce a data warehouse. In other scenarios, it can be a decision based on preference. We can help you determine your solution architecture based on your requirements - talk to our team today.

Power BI Support

We're proud of our Power Platform support offering - there isn't much our team don't know. Whether it's a challenging report or error codes that you just can't get your head around, we'll be there to help.

Our Power BI support team can help with any solution within Microsoft's Power Platform, including Power Apps, Power Automate and Virtual Agents. Read more about why we love the Power Platform here.

Many of our customers cite our excellent knowledge and skilled people as the reason why they love partnering with us. Find out more on our support page here.

Power BI Training

Did you know we offer Power BI training? Taught by our specialists through an online training solution, it's a one-day course designed to:

Learn to create analytical reports to support your business intelligence using Dynamics NAV and Dynamics 365 Business Central data
Ease you into the basics of Power BI, become familiar with the look and feel of the system with one of our Consultants
Understand the main features of Power BI including Visualisations, Data Modelling, Report Design and publishing what you create to PowerBI.com

The course is completely free to sign up to and we usually run them twice a month - you can register for your place by clicking here.

Book your place here

Talk to us about your Power BI requirements

Get in touch