Deltek Vantagepoint to Power BI, done for you
Vantagepoint already holds every hour, invoice, and project record the firm runs on — yet principals still wait on someone to assemble utilization, WIP, backlog, and project profit by hand. A senior US-based engineer builds those views once and keeps them refreshing. Prepaid hours, no contracts, most builds in 3–5 business days.
Representative dashboard — sample data
Firm economics, straight from the ERP
If your architecture, engineering, or government-contracting firm runs on Vantagepoint but the leadership meeting still starts with an export, a Deltek Vantagepoint Power BI dashboard turns those hours, invoices, and project records into live views: billable utilization and effective multiplier, WIP and unbilled, project backlog, project profit, and proposals against actual. We build it and maintain it for you — senior-led, US-based — so principals stop rebuilding the same workbook every week.
Vantagepoint is a capable project-based ERP, and it answers a single question well. Where firms hit the wall is the cross-cutting view: every studio and office side by side, utilization trended by employee and role rather than snapshotted, unbilled work aging before it turns into a write-off, or one auto-refreshed page a principal can open on a Monday. A reporting layer sits on the same records and makes all of that click-through simple, connected through whichever route your deployment supports.
Reports we build from Vantagepoint
Buy a block of prepaid Flex hours and, if you're unhappy within the first 4 hours, we refund you in full — no questions asked. We scope each task and quote the hours before work starts, hours deduct only for work you approve, and your banked hours never expire.
Why firms pick us
You send the request; a senior engineer builds and maintains the reporting around your own projects, phases, labor codes, and org structure.
Most of what you find for this is middleware and templates you wire up yourself, then own forever. We are the opposite: you send the request, and a senior engineer builds the extract, the model, and the report around your actual project structure.
Billable utilization by employee, role, and office; effective multiplier; unbilled aging; project backlog and remaining fee; project profit with overrun flagged early; proposals against won work; and AR collections — in one model rather than seven separate reports.
Power BI ships no first-party Deltek connector. We read through Vantagepoint's documented REST API, a read-only database copy, a reporting data mart, or scheduled exports — and we confirm which route your administrator can actually give us before spending an hour.
One US-based engineer with 20+ years on the Microsoft platform does the extract, the semantic model, and the DAX — no offshore handoffs and no junior guesswork on the numbers your principals and your bank read.
Buy a block of Flex hours, get a scope-and-hours estimate before any work, and hours deduct only for approved builds. No project minimum, no retainer, and a full refund inside the first 4 hours if you are unhappy.
A reporting solution shaped around your firm's own data — not a template. We map your projects, phases, tasks, labor categories, offices, and market sectors into a governed semantic model, write the measures that define utilization and profit the way your firm defines them, then maintain that model as the project mix changes. You review; we build and keep it running.
The gap is rarely that the ERP lacks the data. It is that answering "how did the Boston studio do last quarter, and which projects dragged it down?" means running three reports and reconciling them in Excel. A semantic model collapses that into one page with drill-down. The discipline behind it — grain, dimensions, and measures that agree with each other — is the same work described on our Power BI data modeling and DAX page, and the firm-economics context sits on our Power BI for professional services firms page.
Six areas cover most first engagements: utilization and effective multiplier, WIP and unbilled, project backlog and remaining fee, project profit and overrun, proposals against won and delivered work, and AR collections. Each becomes a page in one model instead of a separate report someone has to run.
Utilization is the one principals argue about most, because the definition matters more than the visual: whether capacity excludes PTO and holidays, whether a fully loaded cost rate carries overhead, and whether promotional or business-development time counts against the target. We pin those rules down with you before building and encode them once as measures, so every page agrees. Backlog and remaining fee answer the staffing question — how many months of signed work stand in front of each studio — and project profit flags overruns while there is still fee left to protect rather than at closeout.
Government contractors add a second layer: indirect-rate trends, labor by contract, and funding against incurred cost, so leadership sees ceiling exposure early. If federal work is the bulk of what you do, your system of record is more likely Deltek's government-contracting ERP than Vantagepoint — that build, with cost pools and contract funding at the centre, is covered on our Deltek Costpoint Power BI dashboard page. To be clear about scope on either platform, we build management reporting, not compliance filings — your accountants and your Deltek configuration stay the system of record for anything submitted to a contracting officer. Firms whose system of record is Unanet rather than either Deltek product get the same project profit, utilization, backlog and indirect-rate picture from a Data Lake replica, covered on our Unanet Power BI dashboard page.
Here is an honest view of the difference, area by area. It is the same data in both columns — the change is that it becomes cross-firm, trendable, and drillable instead of a report you run one question at a time.
| Report area | Typical built-in limitation | Power BI version we build |
|---|---|---|
| Utilization | Run per period and per group; trending means exporting several runs | Employee, role, office, and firm trended together against target, with drill to timesheet detail |
| WIP & unbilled | A list as of a date; aging and movement are reconstructed by hand | Aging buckets, movement since last billing run, and owners of the oldest balances |
| Project backlog | Remaining fee visible project by project | Backlog by studio, sector, and principal, with months of coverage against current capacity |
| Project profit | Known reliably once the project closes | Fee, cost, and effective multiplier in flight, with overrun ranked while fee remains |
| Proposals vs actual | Pipeline sits apart from delivered project financials | Win rate and proposed fee beside what the won work actually earned |
| Leadership summary | No single auto-refreshed page across the whole firm | One page covering utilization, backlog, WIP, and profit, refreshed on a schedule |
Through whichever supported route your deployment allows: Vantagepoint's documented REST API, a read-only copy of the SQL Server database behind it, a reporting data mart your IT team already stages, or scheduled exports for small and stable extracts. We confirm the route with your administrator in the scope estimate, before any hours are used.
Which one fits depends on where your instance runs and how much history you need. Cloud-hosted firms usually go through the API with a scoped, read-only service account. Firms on their own or a partner's servers often get better results from a read-only database copy, because it lets us pull years of timesheet and invoice history incrementally rather than asking a production system for it. If a data mart already exists, we build on it — one copy of the extract logic beats two. Whatever the route, we land the data, refresh only changed rows, and let the report query the modeled copy rather than pointing Power BI at production and hoping.
Refresh then runs inside Microsoft's documented limits: their data refresh reference (opens in new tab) sets out the cadence available on each licence, and where the source sits on your own network an on-premises data gateway (opens in new tab) carries the connection. We configure it, document it, and fix breakages out of your banked hours — the maintenance part that connector tools leave to you. We are not affiliated with Deltek or Microsoft and never imply a partnership; we use their supported, documented interfaces to your own data.
You buy prepaid Flex hours that never expire: Starter $2,500, Growth $4,600, or Power $8,000, with hours from $100. There is no project minimum and no retainer — you send a request, we reply with a scope and the hours it needs, and hours deduct only for work you approve.
The usual pattern for an ERP build is a Growth or Power block: the connection, the model, and the first pages are front-loaded, and the remaining hours go to extra views, measure changes, and refresh care over the following months. Most individual tasks ship in 3–5 business days once you approve the estimate; a first full firm-wide build is larger and gets a clear timeline up front. If you want the general cost picture before you talk to anyone, our guide to what a Power BI dashboard costs to build breaks down the drivers, and how prepaid Flex hours work covers the mechanics.
Architecture, engineering, environmental, and consulting firms running Vantagepoint — plus government contractors on the same platform — usually where a CFO, controller, or managing principal is tired of assembling the same workbook. Firms with no in-house BI team get the most out of it, because the maintenance is included in the model rather than added to someone's job.
You own everything: the report file, the semantic model and measures, the extraction logic, the refresh schedule, and the service account all live in your tenant and your instance. There is no black box and no licence to us — if you never send another request, the dashboards keep running. Firms that also run a manufacturing or distribution arm on a second ERP can see the equivalent build on our Epicor Power BI dashboard page, and groups whose federal division sits on Deltek's government-contracting ERP should read the Costpoint dashboard build for indirect rates and contract funding alongside this one. Contact is form-only: send your request and we reply with a scope estimate.
business days, typical
hours, never expire
own everything
Hours deduct only for work you approve, and unused hours stay banked for the next request. See Flex pricing →
How it works
Tell us your project structure, your org hierarchy, and the reports you need. We agree the definitions — utilization, cost rate, backlog — and reply with a scope and hours estimate, including the confirmed access route, before any work begins.
A senior US-based engineer sets up the extract, builds the semantic model and the DAX, and validates every total against your own reports, so principals trust the numbers before launch. Most focused builds land in 3–5 business days.
We publish to your workspace, set scheduled refresh within Microsoft's limits, add row-level security by office or practice where you need it, and hand over the file and credentials. You own it; we maintain it from your banked hours.
Representative perspective
Every month started with someone running the same three reports and reconciling them in a spreadsheet before the principals' meeting. Now utilization and backlog refresh themselves, and the meeting is about the two studios that need attention.Managing principal, architecture firm
Representative perspective
Unbilled work was aging quietly inside individual projects. Seeing the oldest balances and who owns them on one page changed which conversations we have at billing review, and it took days to build rather than a quarter.Controller, engineering consultancy
Tell us your deployment, your project structure, and the reports you need. We'll confirm the access route, scope the task, and quote the hours before any work begins — drawn from prepaid Flex hours that never expire, with no project minimums and no obligation.
FAQ
Power BI ships no first-party Deltek connector, so we use whichever supported route your deployment allows: Vantagepoint's documented REST API, a read-only copy of the SQL Server database behind it, a reporting data mart your IT team already stages, or scheduled exports. We confirm the route with your administrator in the scope estimate before any hours are used.
Yes, and it is the most common reason firms call. Vantagepoint answers a question well one report at a time; we build a single semantic model where utilization, WIP, backlog, and project profit sit side by side and filter by office, studio, market sector, principal, or project manager, with drill-down to the individual project.
No. We are an independent US-based Power BI service and we claim no Deltek or Microsoft partnership. We build using supported, documented tools — Deltek's published interfaces to your own data and Microsoft's Power BI platform. Our engineers are Microsoft-certified, but we never overstate the relationship with either vendor.
Yes. Firms often keep design or field data outside the ERP, and some run a second accounting system after an acquisition. We can model both sides together — hours and project financials beside the other source — provided we can read that system through a supported connection. We confirm every source and method in the scope estimate first.
We build management reporting, not compliance filings. Dashboards can show indirect-rate trends, contract funding against incurred cost, and labor by contract so leadership sees exposure early, but your accountants and your Deltek configuration remain the system of record for anything you submit to a contracting officer.
Book a free demo
Tell us the task. We scope it, you approve, and a senior consultant delivers — typically in 3–5 business days. Prepaid hours that never expire.
The fastest way to reach us is the form — tell us the task and we'll reply within one business day.