Are you exploring whether Power BI is a good fit for your organisation? Or maybe you are using Excel and looking to move your reporting to Power BI.
Start with a complimentary one-hour discovery session. During the session, our consultant will learn about your current state of reporting and help you explore the next steps on your Power BI journey.
Join us for a one-day Power BI Dashboard in a Day training workshop. During the hands-on workshop, attendees will better understand how to:
Ensuring your data analytics operations are keeping up with the pace of innovation is more crucial than ever. The pace of innovation in data analytics technology is relentless, and the opportunities presented by AI are reshaping business operations.
This optimisation workshop is key to discovering ways to maximise the impact of Power BI within your organisation.
While some organisations opt to take on a Power BI project without engaging with an external consultant, we find many of our clients gain substantial value from partnering with an industry expert to help guide them through the project. We have applied different models of engagement, subject to the resources and business intelligence skills that the client can contribute to the project.
If you are currently partnering with us for other solutions such Dynamics 365 Business Central or Dynamics GP and are now considering Power BI, our consultants can help you accelerate your Power BI journey by leveraging their experience of working with Microsoft Dynamics software solutions.
Are you ready to start exploring the value that Power BI can bring to your organisation? Connect with us and we will work with your organisation's individual circumstances to guide you on the first step of discovery.
We offer a structured consulting approach to help you effectively leverage Power BI, align reporting with business goals, and drive adoption across your organisation. Our services include current state assessments, architecture design, and licensing planning to ensure scalability, compliance, and cost-efficiency.
We provide end-to-end Power BI implementation services, including setting up data integrations with your source systems, designing data models, and building custom dashboards and reports. Our consultants optimise DAX for performance and implement robust security models to control access and protect sensitive data.
We support continuous improvement through analysis of usage metrics to highlight what’s working and where gaps exist. We gather user feedback to refine reports, evaluate opportunities for new data integrations, and keep your environment clean, relevant, and aligned with business needs. Our team ensures your Power BI setup stays fast, efficient, and valuable over time.
We provide tailored Power BI training, from executive briefings to hands-on analyst workshops, to build user confidence and drive adoption. As a Microsoft delivery partner, we also run free, online Dashboard in a Day sessions almost monthly, ideal for onboarding new users or reinforcing skills. Our programs focus on practical learning that helps teams quickly get value from Power BI.
Whether you're moving from spreadsheets or a legacy BI tool, we can help you switch to Power BI. We also help integrate data from business systems for consistent reporting. For more complex requirements, we offer support for scaling with Microsoft Fabric, including lakehouse architecture and real-time analytics. Options can be reviewed as your systems and requirements change.
Ongoing support is available to help teams manage Power BI more effectively. This includes regular health checks, troubleshooting, and assistance with workspace and governance tasks. For organisations needing more hands-on support, managed services are available to keep Power BI running smoothly day to day.
Book a free consultation with one of our Power BI experts to discuss your goals.
Project managers click the report in Power BI and all the information is in front of them. This has enabled efficiencies in admin work and freed up time to focus on service delivery.
PA developed the reports that met our vision, and our in-house Power BI experts were able to shadow and learn throughout the process.
“We were invited to a free PA webinar on Power BI and saw first-hand from the expert presenter how Power BI could transform how our data could be viewed, interpreted, and acted upon.”
The information Power BI provides us with has set the strategic direction of the business. It allows us to see where we can advance safety and bring improvements and innovation to the projects we deliver.
Power BI has allowed us to look at every aspect of the business in a completely different way, challenging preconceptions to allow every person to be more effective in the delivery of their role. It has been a change in culture for the whole organisation.
Professional Advantage’s team is technically sound and has a spectrum of understanding that is broad and deep enough to recommend different and modern ways to do things. For a client, that’s excellent!
“We definitely like Power BI and think it will be our BI tool. While we are constantly on the lookout for tools to improve our business practices, any additional BI needs that we identify will be assessed through the lens of can Power BI handle it? From what I have seen with the support of Professional Advantage, I am confident the answer will be yes.”
I initially found out about the training through an email from PA. PA highlighted a connection between GP and Power BI and it was the pushing of this message that convinced me to look into Power BI further.
Professionals Advantage helped this construction company with their business-wide initiative to democratise their organisation’s data, empowering users with better access and interpretation.
Our client in the healthcare industry identified a need to better analyse, display and interpret their data and cases.Read how Power BI has brought about a change in culture for the whole organisation.
SS&A Albury break the mould and identify beyond the visualisations of Power BI, utilising the tool for key calculations within the business.
Organisations use Microsoft Power BI to create, share, and consume business insights from their data easily and interactively.
Power BI can connect to various data sources, including Excel files, on-premises data, and data stored in the cloud. This enables users to integrate data from different business systems into one data model and uncover insights that may otherwise be missed.
Once set up, reports can be shared with other users within the organisation in the Power BI Service, where users can interact securely with the data.
Connect to 100s of data sources to load the data.
Build the data model, transform the data, and create measure.
Create your reports and dashboards.
Share your reports to Power BI Mobile, Publish to Web, Microsoft Teams and other Microsoft Office tools.
Explore insights, collaborate, and make informed decisions.
Power BI has been designed with the end user in mind. It is intuitive and easy to use by users with no technical background.
Advanced users can utilise Power BI to accomplish more complex data analysis. It fits most industries and works with your existing software systems.
Easily create stunning reports with interactive data visualisations using Power BI's drag and drop user interface.
Accelerate your journey by choosing from ready made apps or create your own.
Most importantly, Power BI does not slow down as your data grows. It can handle both small and big data projects.
Join your data sources together into one place so everyone is working on the same data. No more disputes about which data is right or where it is coming from.
Once the data transformation rules are set, your data is always up to date with automated, incremental refreshes.
This automated data load process saves organisations hours that would otherwise be spent manipulating and preparing data for reporting.
Power BI makes the dream of data-driven collaboration in your organisation a reality.
Because of it's seamless integration with other Microsoft products, Power BI reports and dashboards can be embedded in apps such as Microsoft Teams and SharePoint Online.
Tag colleagues and add comments as you work with dashboards to start a discussion about the insights you are discovering.
Power BI alone is powerful, but as a component of the Power Platform it enables you to go to the next step with business process automation.
Once you discover new insight from you data, you can use Power Apps and Power Automate to build action steps and workflow processes that can be started from within your Power BI report.
Building these solutions was something reserved for IT or experienced developers. With the Power Platform, business users with no coding experience can create low-code apps to solve business process challenges.
There are three main components to Power BI, with each component serving a different purpose:
The Power BI Desktop is the complete report authoring tool for report designers. It is downloaded as a free application and installed on a local computer. The desktop allows you to connect to different types of data sources and then transform it in a data model. The final part of the report creation process is to add visuals based on the data model.
The Power BI Service is the cloud-based service where users view and interact with the reports. Report designers use the Desktop application to publish the Power BI reports to the Service. Users in the Service can utilise the self service features to edit the existing reports or create new reports and visuals based on the published semantic model. The Service also allows extensive sharing and collaboration with co-workers within the Service and the wider Microsoft 365 application ecosphere.
Microsoft have integrated the Power BI Service as part of Microsoft Fabric, a comprehensive data analytics platform. They are constantly improving Power BI so there are a growing number of areas where the Desktop and Service overlap within the overall Fabric platform. However most implementations use the Power BI Desktop to author the reports and the Service to distribute the reports with others.
New to Power BI and want to learn more? Check out our workshops and discovery sessions at Professional Advantage.
Power BI is a powerful interactive data visualisation and analytics tool that can draw data from a wide variety of sources including budgeting and forecasting data that can reside in an ERP system and/or Excel. In many cases, Excel is still the tool of choice for an organisation's planning and budgeting process especially if there is not a lot of complexity and minimal requirements in the model structure.
Where the level of complexity in a planning process increases, there are further considerations in choosing an appropriate tool especially where Excel is no longer a workable solution. This can include situations where multiple planners are involved and there are multi-level organisational inputs to be considered.
Power BI can function as an aggregation and modelling tool, to aggregate separate planning datasets (created in Excel or other systems) together with data actuals and create a consolidated planning report. There are still some downsides to this approach, especially uncovering errors when using Excel and implementing top down changes.
The most effective method for a complex planning process is to implement a single central data model solution that enables the user to easily read and write back to a data model totally customised to how the organisation operates. This enables a single approach to all aspects of planning whether it be sales forecasting, operational budgets, cashflow, or workforce and asset planning. Professional Advantage implement these type of corporate performance management tools that can be used either standalone or in conjunction with Power BI's reporting capabilities.
Extend Solver's Reporting and Planning capabilities with data visualisations in Power BI.
In June 2019, Microsoft introduced paginated reports in Power BI. This allows Power BI developers to create formatted pixel perfect reports in the Power BI Service. Paginated reports allow organisations to create fixed layout reports for printing and pdf creation. Paginated reports within Power BI is currently only available for organisations licenced for Power BI Premium. Please contact Professional Advantage if you would like further information on paginated reports and Power BI Premium.
The Power BI Desktop is a free download and you can register for the Power BI Service at no cost (with a business email address). This enables anyone to easily start building reports.
The Power BI Service becomes a paid requirement when you wish to share and distribute reports to other users within your organisation. Each user will require a Power BI Pro licence and this is activated within the administration of Office 365.
For larger organisations, Power BI is also offered as a capacity licence with Microsoft Fabric. However, capacity licencing should only be considered for organisations approaching 1,000 or more Power BI users. Further information regarding licencing costs can be found at the following link: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/pricing/
Read about the most frequently asked questions here.
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