Fixed-fee dashboard builds
One scoped dashboard, one agreed price, delivered end to end — sources connected, model built, visuals designed, refresh scheduled, and the whole thing handed over documented.
Power BI consultant · Seattle
Power BI Consultant Seattle Companies Hire by the Hour
Product telemetry sits in one warehouse, the ledger that books the revenue sits in another, and a supplier or lane scorecard sits in a spreadsheet somebody maintains by hand. We are the senior, US-based team Puget Sound operators bring in when all three have to agree inside one governed model.
Buy it as a fixed-fee dashboard build, or as prepaid hours that never expire and start at $100. No retainer, no paid discovery phase, and a free demo before you commit anything. See Flex pricing.
Representative dashboard — sample data
Remote-first, senior, no lock-in
A region that already knows the Microsoft stack
Reporting expectations run high around Puget Sound, and Microsoft’s Redmond campus is a large part of why. People here have used Power BI at a previous employer, sat in a Fabric session at a local user group, or worked next to somebody who ships on the platform for a living. So the constraint is rarely awareness of what the tool can do. It is senior time: the reports that exist were stood up quickly by an analyst, a controller, or an engineer who already had a full job, and nobody has gone back to fix the model underneath them.
The regional economy sharpens that. Cloud and subscription software companies are judged on retention and cost to serve, and both are computed from telemetry that finance did not choose. Aerospace and advanced-manufacturing suppliers feeding the assembly lines at Everett and Renton live or die on rate readiness and supplier quality, which sit in an MRP system and a quality system that were never joined. Freight forwarders, drayage operators, and customs brokers working the Seattle and Tacoma waterfront are measured in hours of dwell. Life sciences groups and hospital systems watch study spend, throughput, and revenue cycle daily.
What those businesses share is not an industry, it is a wiring problem. The system that records the work was chosen by operations; the system that records the money was chosen by finance, often years apart, and nobody ever modeled the join. So the number in the operations review and the number in the month-end pack disagree, and the meeting becomes an argument about which export is right instead of what to do next.
Where we start
Three ways a Puget Sound engagement usually begins
Most start one of three ways: a single fixed-fee dashboard that settles an argument leadership keeps having, a health check on a Power BI estate somebody inherited and nobody trusts, or a block of prepaid hours pointed at a reporting backlog that has been sitting since last quarter.
What’s included
The work that makes operational reporting stick
Take one piece or the whole program. Every task is scoped in hours and approved before it starts — as a fixed-fee build or against a prepaid Flex block.
Product, program and job-level models
A star-schema model with one definition per metric, so net revenue retention, cost to serve, and cost-to-complete mean the same thing in the board pack as they do in the product review or on the shop floor.
Refresh and gateway reliability
Scheduled refresh that finishes before the first standup or first shift, gateway configuration documented, and failure alerts routed to a named person rather than discovered by a customer.
Row-level security and sensitive data
Workspace structure, dataset certification, and row-level security so a program manager, a clinic administrator, or a customer-facing account team sees only its slice while leadership sees the whole.
Health-check audits
A structured review of workspaces, models, refresh reliability, security, and licensing, delivered as risk-ranked findings with a remediation plan your team can work down over a quarter.
Handover and enablement
Recorded walkthroughs, documented measures, and named owners, so the people who run these reports every week can change them without waiting on us or on anyone’s calendar.
How it works
From a free demo to a working report
- 1
Free demo and scoping call
Thirty minutes on Pacific time. You describe the decision the report has to support and which systems hold the data; we ask the questions that decide whether this is a two-day job or a two-week one. Nothing is billed for this.
- 2
Written scope and price
You get a written scope with a fixed hour count and price before anything starts. Approve it and work begins; walk away and you have spent nothing. Hours are only ever deducted against work you approved.
- 3
Build, review, hand over
We build inside your tenant, review it with you on a screen share, then hand over the model, the report, the documentation, and a recorded walkthrough. Most focused tasks land in three to five business days.
What Puget Sound industries actually ask Power BI to answer
The questions are operational before they are financial. A subscription software company wants retention and cost to serve by cohort and plan, because growth bought at an unprofitable support ratio is still a problem. An aerospace supplier wants rate readiness by part and supplier, because a single late detail fitting stops a line that costs far more than the part. A forwarder moving containers across the Seattle and Tacoma waterfront wants dwell and detention exposure by box while there is still time to move it.
Five different sectors, one shared shape: the operational system knows what happened, the finance system knows what it cost, and nobody has modeled the join. That is the work. The table below is the map we start from on a Seattle scoping call.
| Seattle-area sector | The question leadership keeps asking | Where the data usually lives | Typical first dashboard |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cloud & subscription software | Which cohorts and plans actually retain, and what does each customer cost us to serve? | Product telemetry warehouse, billing platform, CRM, support desk, cloud cost exports | ARR and net revenue retention by cohort, with churn drivers next to cost to serve |
| Aerospace & advanced manufacturing | Are we going to hit rate, and which suppliers put the schedule at risk? | ERP and MRP, MES and quality systems, supplier portals, inspection and NCR records | On-time delivery and rate readiness by part and supplier, with scrap and rework cost |
| Puget Sound logistics & trade | How long is freight sitting, and is this lane still profitable after accessorials? | TMS, terminal and drayage systems, customs and forwarding platforms, carrier invoices | Container dwell, detention exposure, and margin per lane and customer |
| Life sciences & healthcare | Are studies and clinics running to budget and to the schedule we published? | EHR and practice-management extracts, study and lab systems, grant and project ledgers | Days in A/R and denial rate by payer, or study spend against budget by milestone |
| Engineering & construction | Are projects earning what we bid once change orders and rework land? | Project controls, ERP job cost, timesheets, subcontractor and vendor invoices | Earned value, cost-to-complete, and change-order impact by project and phase |
If your sector is on that list, the industry pages go deeper on the metrics themselves — SaaS and subscription reporting in Power BI, manufacturing and logistics reporting, and construction job costing and WIP. This page is about how the work gets delivered to a team in the Pacific Northwest.
Working next door to Redmond raises the bar, not the price
Being close to the people who build the platform has a real effect on scoping calls here: teams ask about Fabric, Direct Lake, and deployment pipelines in the first thirty minutes rather than the third month. That is a good thing, and we would rather answer those questions honestly than sell around them. Sometimes the right answer is that a well-modeled import dataset on a Pro workspace is enough, and the capacity conversation can wait. When it genuinely is the right move, Microsoft Fabric consulting covers the lakehouse and pipeline side, and Microsoft’s own Direct Lake overview (opens in new tab) sets out what it does and does not replace.
The other local pattern is capacity rather than knowledge. Plenty of teams around here could build what they need if two senior weeks appeared on the calendar, and they never do. That is the gap we fill: named senior hours against a defined backlog, no headcount, no retainer, and no obligation to keep buying once the backlog clears.
Security, supplier terms, and who is allowed to see what
Access is a design problem here more often than in most metros. Aerospace and defense-adjacent programs carry contractual restrictions on who may see part numbers, drawings, schedules, and supplier terms; clinical and revenue-cycle reporting touches protected health information; and software companies hold customer-level usage data their own contracts constrain. In every case we design to the minimum necessary, put row-level security in Power BI (opens in new tab) around the rest, and write the access decisions down for whoever has to answer your compliance or program office.
Everything is built inside your own tenant, under your existing agreements and controls, so the data never moves to us. What we do not do is make the compliance determination for you — whether a given program or dataset can be reported on, and by whom, stays with your team. We build to the rule you set, and we would rather design that once at the start than retrofit it after a report has already been shared with forty people.
Why the model matters more than the visuals
Most of the reports we are asked to rescue are slow and untrusted for one reason: the wrong grain, chosen early, then papered over with DAX for a year. A telemetry event, an invoice line, a purchase-order receipt, and a cost-code transaction are four different grains, and a model that blends them without a proper fact-and-dimension split produces numbers that are subtly wrong in ways nobody can trace. We design against Microsoft’s star schema guidance (opens in new tab), and it is a fair thing to ask any consultant you are evaluating about — including us.
Where the source systems sit behind a plant firewall or an on-premises ERP, the refresh path matters as much as the model. We document gateway configuration and refresh windows so the report is finished before the first shift, not halfway through it. Our data modeling and DAX work covers that craft in detail, and Power BI dashboard development covers the build itself.
What it costs, and how a fixed fee and prepaid hours fit together
Two ways to buy, same engineer. A single dashboard can be quoted as a fixed-fee build: we scope it after the free demo, quote an hour count and a price, and that is what you pay. For ongoing work, prepaid Flex blocks are cheaper per hour and far more flexible — you bank hours, send tasks as they come up, and each one is scoped and approved before it draws down. Hours never expire, there is no retainer, and there is no project minimum. Rates start at $100 per hour on the largest block.
| Flex block | Prepaid hours | Price (USD) | Typical fit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | 20 hours | $2,500 | A first fixed-fee dashboard, a health check, or a targeted fix |
| Growth | 40 hours | $4,600 | An ongoing backlog across several reports |
| Power | 80 hours | $8,000 | A multi-report rollout at our lowest hourly rate, from $100/hour |
If budget is the constraint that brought you here, affordable Power BI consulting is an honest place to compare that model against agencies and offshore shops. If what you need is capacity rather than advice, hire a Power BI developer by the hour describes engaging one named senior engineer against your own backlog. The full mechanics — scoping, hour logging, what happens when a block runs low — are on how it works and pricing. When you are ready, send us the task and we will scope it.
Typical deliverables
- A fixed-fee dashboard with refresh scheduled and documented
- A documented semantic model with agreed metric definitions
- A health-check audit with risk-ranked findings
- Row-level security design for program, clinical, or customer data
- Recorded handover walkthroughs for the people who run it weekly
Flex hours
Prepaid tiers
Starter $2,500, Growth $4,600, or Power $8,000 — from $100/hour at the largest block. Senior-led, US-based, and the hours never expire.
Who it’s for
Pacific Northwest teams we help most
Cloud & subscription software
Finance, RevOps, and product leaders who need retention, expansion, and cost to serve computed once, from telemetry and billing, instead of three times in three spreadsheets.
Aerospace & advanced manufacturing
Suppliers and shops feeding the assembly lines around Everett and Renton, tracking rate readiness, supplier on-time delivery, scrap and rework against the programs that pay for them.
Freight, drayage & customs
Forwarders, brokers, and terminal-adjacent operators who need dwell, detention exposure, and true landed cost per lane in one governed model rather than a nightly export.
Life sciences, healthcare & construction
Research, clinical, and project teams reporting study or job spend, throughput, revenue cycle, and cost-to-complete to funders, owners, and their own operations review.
Representative perspective
“Product counted active accounts one way and finance counted them another, so every board pack started with a reconciliation. One model with the definitions written down ended that in a fortnight.”VP Finance, subscription software company
Representative perspective
“We needed supplier on-time delivery and quality escapes on one page, with program data locked down by role from day one. The scope came back in writing and the refresh has run before the morning production meeting since.”Operations manager, aerospace component supplier
Put a senior engineer on your reporting backlog
Bring the report that keeps getting rebuilt by hand, the refresh that fails overnight, or the model nobody trusts. Thirty minutes on Pacific time is usually enough to tell you what it takes — and you get that answer whether or not you buy anything.
FAQ
Questions from Seattle teams
No, and we would rather say that than imply an address we do not keep. We are a US-based, remote-first practice that works Pacific-time hours for Puget Sound clients. The work happens inside your own tenant over a screen share, so a downtown suite would show up in your rate and nowhere else.
Five, mostly: cloud and subscription software teams modeling retention and cost to serve; aerospace and advanced-manufacturing suppliers tracking rate readiness and quality; freight, drayage, and customs teams moving cargo across the Puget Sound waterfront; life sciences and healthcare groups; and engineering and construction firms reporting earned value.
Usually capacity and a second opinion on the model, not tool training. Teams here are fluent in Power BI and short on senior time, so the reports that exist were built quickly by people with other jobs. We take the model, the refresh path, and the security design off their plate without adding headcount.
Yes. After a free demo and scoping call we send a written scope with a fixed hour count and a fixed price, and nothing starts until you approve it. A first dashboard usually fits inside the Starter block at $2,500. You are never billed for work you did not approve in advance.
Hours are prepaid in three Flex blocks: Starter 20 hours at $2,500, Growth 40 hours at $4,600, and Power 80 hours at $8,000, which is our lowest rate at $100 per hour. Hours never expire, there is no retainer, and every task is scoped and approved before it draws down.
You do, completely. Everything is built in your own Power BI tenant with documented measures, no proprietary layer, and no license tied back to us. If you stop working with us tomorrow, your team keeps every model, report, and document, and can maintain them without us.
Service area
Where else we work
Seattle is one metro in a nationwide, remote-first practice. Our other city pages, each weighted to the industries that dominate there:
- Power BI consultant Los Angeles — our other West Coast metro, weighted to media, real estate, and professional services
- Power BI consultant Austin — weighted to subscription software, fintech, and semiconductor teams
- Power BI consultant in Houston
- Power BI consultant in San Antonio
- Power BI consultant in San Diego
- Power BI consultant in Las Vegas — the same Pacific-time schedule, weighted to casino resorts and gaming operators, hospitality and entertainment, convention and event services, and I-15 corridor distribution
- Power BI consultant in Denver — Mountain-time delivery for Front Range energy, aerospace, and construction teams
- Power BI consultant in Chicago — Central-time delivery for Chicagoland logistics, food and CPG manufacturing, and insurance brokerage
Try us risk-free for 4 hours
If you’re unhappy within the first 4 hours of your block, we’ll refund you in full — no questions asked. Hours are deducted only for work you’ve reviewed and approved.
Book a free demo
Get senior Power BI help, on demand
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.
- Prepaid hours from $100/hour — and they never expire
- Senior-led delivery — 20+ years on the Microsoft platform
- Typical 3–5 business day turnaround
- Full refund if you’re unhappy in your first 4 hours
The fastest way to reach us is the form — tell us the task and we'll reply within one business day.