Unanet to Power BI, done for you
Project profit, utilization, backlog and the indirect rates Unanet already calculates — modelled from the project, task and assignment structure you actually run, at the timesheet and expense grain Unanet captures. A senior US-based engineer builds it and keeps it refreshing, from prepaid hours, most tasks inside 3–5 business days.
Representative dashboard — sample data
The replica is the easy half
Unanet already holds the record that matters: every hour charged to a task, every expense line, every budget and every amount billed, captured once at the source. The reporting problem starts one step later — a project manager wants burn against budget, a principal wants utilization by studio, and finance wants backlog and margin on the same page, so somebody exports three reports and reconciles them in a workbook before every meeting.
We build and maintain that page instead. The extraction route is settled first, the project, task and assignment structure is modelled as a real hierarchy rather than flattened into a label, timesheet and expense records stay at their own grain, and the measures are written once so every page agrees. You review the numbers; a senior US-based engineer builds the model and keeps it refreshing.
Reports we build from Unanet
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've approved, and your banked hours never expire.
Why firms on Unanet call us
You send the request; a senior engineer settles the access route, models your own project structure, and maintains it as projects open and close.
Unanet describes the Data Lake as a real-time replica of your database that BI tools connect to. Getting from that replica to a report that refreshes on a schedule still takes a gateway, a query plan and a model — that middle part is what we do.
Projects, tasks and the people assigned to them are modelled as a hierarchy with a path, so a number rolls up from a task to a project to a division and drills back down without a second report or a manually maintained mapping table.
One row per person, per task, per day for time; one row per line for expenses. Utilization, billability and project cost then come from the same table, and any tile on any page drills through to the underlying entries.
Row-level security is driven from your own organization and project structure, so a project manager sees their projects, a principal sees their studio or division, and pay-sensitive detail stays off pages that do not need it.
Utilization, backlog and what counts as billable mean different things in different firms. We write yours down, encode them once as measures, and validate every total against a Unanet report your team already trusts.
Starter $2,500, Growth $4,600 or Power $8,000, with hourly from $100. No project minimum, no contract, and a full refund inside the first 4 hours if you are unhappy.
Through the Unanet Data Lake in most cases. Unanet states that the Data Lake provides a real-time replica of your Unanet database that you can connect to Power BI or Tableau (opens in new tab), reached with the ODBC or JDBC driver Unanet supplies. There is no first-party Unanet connector in Power BI, so that replica — not a screen-scrape and not a nightly report someone remembers to run — is the supported extraction route.
A driver-based source behaves differently from a cloud connector once the report leaves your laptop. The Power BI service cannot reach it directly, so scheduled refresh normally runs through an on-premises data gateway (opens in new tab) installed where the driver lives, inside the cadence Microsoft documents in its data refresh reference (opens in new tab). Where several years of timesheets have accumulated, incremental refresh (opens in new tab) re-reads only a recent window instead of the whole history every cycle. We install it, document it, and fix it out of your banked hours when something breaks — the part a connector product leaves to you.
If the Data Lake is not enabled on your subscription, the build still works: we land scheduled Unanet exports into a store you own and model from there. It carries less detail and takes more care to keep honest, so we say which route you have, and what it costs you in coverage, in the scope estimate before any hours are used.
Four groups carry almost every question firms ask. The project and task structure with its budgets, the assignments that put named people on those tasks, the timesheet entries behind hours, and the expense and vendor cost lines behind everything else. Billing and revenue records join them where margin and backlog are in scope.
Modelling the first two properly is what separates a useful report from a pretty one. Unanet lets a project carry tasks several levels deep, and firms use that depth — phases under projects, sub-tasks under phases, a different shape per client. Flattened into a single label, that structure stops rolling up, and every number has to be re-aggregated by hand. We build it as a parent-child hierarchy with a path, so the same measure answers "how is this task doing" and "how is this division doing". Assignments matter for the same reason: the planned hours on an assignment are what makes a burn chart forward-looking instead of a post-mortem, and the resource plan versus actual comparison lives entirely on that join. The grain discipline underneath all of it is the same craft described on our Power BI data modeling and DAX page.
Unanet reports its own data well — the question a report answers, it answers accurately and as of now. The difference a semantic model makes is cross-project, trended over time, and defined once, so the same utilization number appears on the principal's page and the project manager's page without anyone reconciling two exports.
| Unanet record | Grain it is captured at | What the model adds |
|---|---|---|
| Projects & tasks | A project with tasks nested several levels deep, each carrying its own budget and dates | A parent-child hierarchy with a path, so cost, revenue and hours roll up and drill down through the same measure |
| Assignments & resource plan | A person assigned to a task with planned hours over a date range | Plan versus actual by person and task, forward burn against remaining budget, and bench or over-commitment visible before the month closes |
| Timesheets | One entry per person, per task, per day, with a pay or bill type | Utilization and billability on one definition, trended by week, with drill-through from any tile to the underlying entries |
| Expenses & vendor cost | One line per expense or cost item against a project and task | True project cost beside labor rather than in a separate report, with reimbursable and non-reimbursable split out |
| Billing & revenue | Invoices and recognized revenue posted against project and period | Margin by project and phase, realization against standard rates, and unbilled balances aged rather than shown as a single period figure |
| Indirect rates | The provisional and actual rates Unanet ERP GovCon calculates for you | The rates Unanet computes, trended month over month and carried into project margin — read from Unanet, never recalculated by us |
The honest answer is usually "both". Keep Unanet's reporting for running the business day to day, and use the model for the questions that decide staffing, pricing and which projects get a conversation this month.
Unanet sells two ERPs that share a project, task and timesheet spine but serve different buyers: one for government contractors, one for architecture and engineering firms. The data model work is close to identical. The reporting priorities are not, and that decides what your first three pages look like.
Federal firms lead with funded value, burn against ceiling, labor by contract and indirect rates — and those rates are the one area we deliberately do not reinvent. Unanet ERP GovCon calculates them; the dashboard trends what it calculates. If you want the pool-and-base treatment in depth, including how DCAA-driven cost-pool structures shape a model, that is covered on our Deltek Costpoint Power BI dashboard page, which is the equivalent build for the other GovCon ERP. A/E firms lead with utilization by studio, net service revenue, backlog and effort against fee; the same questions on Deltek's A/E platform are on our Deltek Vantagepoint Power BI dashboard page. If you are still deciding which metrics belong on a leadership page at all, the vendor-neutral version of that argument is on our Power BI for professional services firms page.
Prepaid Flex hours that never expire: Starter 20 hours at $125/hr ($2,500), Growth 40 hours at $115/hr ($4,600), Power 80 hours at $100/hr ($8,000), with hourly work from $100/hour on the largest block. A first build covering project profit, burn against budget and utilization from an approved Data Lake connection usually fits a Starter block.
Growth is the more common choice once backlog, resource plan versus actual, or several years of timesheet history come in, because agreeing definitions across project management and finance takes discussion as well as development. Most individual tasks ship within 3–5 business days of scope approval, and you get a scope and hours estimate before anything starts. Our guide to what a Power BI dashboard costs to build covers what moves the number, and how prepaid Flex hours work explains the model in full.
Firms running Unanet with enough project history to trend and no dedicated analytics engineer — typically the point where the same three exports get rebuilt before every leadership meeting, or two departments quote different utilization figures in the same room. Controllers, finance directors, principals and operations leads are the people who usually get in touch.
Writing back to Unanet is out of scope: this is a read-only reporting build, and timesheet, billing and project changes belong in the ERP. Compliance filings are out of scope too. We build management reporting that shows exposure early; your accountants and your Unanet configuration stay the system of record for anything submitted to a client, a contracting officer or an auditor. You own everything we build — the report file, the semantic model and measures, the extraction logic and the refresh schedule all live in your tenant. Contact is form-only: send your request and we reply with a scope estimate.
business days, typical
hours, never expire
own everything
A first Unanet build usually fits inside one Flex block, and hours deduct only for work you approve. See Flex pricing →
How it works
We check whether the Data Lake is enabled and who owns the credentials, then agree the definitions that decide every number: what counts as billable, how utilization is calculated, how backlog is measured, and how deep your task structure really goes. You get a scope and hours estimate before any work begins.
A senior US-based engineer builds the extraction, the project and task hierarchy, the timesheet and expense fact tables and the DAX — then validates every total against a Unanet report your team already runs, so finance trusts the numbers before launch. Most focused builds land in 3–5 business days.
We publish to your workspace, set scheduled or incremental refresh through the gateway, apply row-level security by organization and project, and hand over the file, the credentials and the documentation. You own it; we maintain it from your banked hours.
Representative perspective
Burn against budget existed in the ERP, but only per project and only if you went looking. Seeing every project ranked by how fast it is consuming its fee changed which ones we talk about on Monday.Controller, government contractor
Representative perspective
Two groups reported utilization two different ways and both were defensible. Agreeing the definition once and putting it in the model ended an argument we had been having every quarter.Principal, architecture and engineering firm
Tell us which Unanet product you run, whether the Data Lake is enabled, and the three questions leadership asks first. 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 Unanet connector, so the usual route is the Unanet Data Lake, which Unanet describes as a real-time replica of your Unanet database that you connect BI tools to over the ODBC or JDBC driver it supplies. Because that is a driver-based source rather than a cloud connector, scheduled refresh normally runs through an on-premises data gateway, which we set up and document.
The Data Lake is the cleanest route because it gives repeatable table-level access instead of a report someone has to run. Where it is not enabled, we build from scheduled Unanet exports landed into a store you own, which still supports history and refresh but limits how much detail is available. We confirm which route you have before any hours are used.
The grain Unanet captures it at: one row per person, per project task, per day for time, and one row per expense line for costs. Keeping that grain is what lets utilization, project profit and billability all come from the same table, and it is what makes drill-through from a portfolio page to a single timesheet line possible.
Unanet sells separate products for the two markets, and most firms run one of them. Where a group runs both — a federal division and a design practice under one parent — we align the project, organization and person dimensions first, then build shared measures, because the two configurations rarely code projects the same way.
Yes. Row-level security is driven from your own organization and project structure, so a project manager sees their projects, a principal sees their studio or division, and only finance sees the consolidated picture. We mirror the boundaries your Unanet roles already enforce rather than publishing a looser second permission model.
No. We are an independent US-based Power BI service and claim no Unanet or Microsoft partnership. We build using supported, documented routes — Unanet's own published access to your data and Microsoft's Power BI platform. Our engineers are Microsoft-certified, but we never overstate the relationship with either vendor.
If your federal division runs Deltek's government-contracting ERP instead, the cost-pool and indirect-rate build is on our Deltek Costpoint Power BI dashboard page. Design firms on Deltek's A/E platform should read the Deltek Vantagepoint Power BI dashboard build, where utilization, WIP and backlog come from that object model instead. For the metrics argument itself — which numbers belong on a leadership page for any project-based firm — start with Power BI for professional services firms, and the modelling craft underneath every one of these builds is described in data modeling and DAX. Contractors in the capital region can see how the same engagement is delivered locally on our Power BI consultant Washington DC page, which sets out what each contract type — fixed-price, time and materials, cost-reimbursable, or an IDIQ task order — changes in the semantic model. Every task is scoped before work begins from your prepaid block of senior-led hours — no project minimums, no change-order surprises, and hours are deducted only for work you approve.
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.