Your board wants margin by production and the answer is five spreadsheets and a producer's memory
A custom BI dashboard build for a Wellington organisation runs NZD 50,000 to 200,000 over 3 to 7 months. Build custom (or model-first BI) when your data is scattered across job-costing spreadsheets, Xero, and project tools that don't share a key. Tableau, Power BI, and Looker draw beautiful charts on top of a clean data model. They can't fix the fact that your per-production margin lives in five disconnected spreadsheets.
Your Wellington studio's board asks a simple question, what's our margin by production, and the honest answer is a producer's memory plus five spreadsheets that don't agree. The crew costs are in one place, gear hire in another, revenue in Xero, schedule in a project tool, and none of them share a production key. People reach for Power BI or Tableau expecting answers, but a BI tool only visualises what you give it, and what you'd give it is a mess.
Government and tech teams hit the same wall: data spread across systems with no common model, so every board deck is a manual export-and-stitch exercise that's stale by the time it's presented. The bottleneck isn't the chart; it's that nothing upstream agrees on what a job, a cost, or a period even is.
Where the off-the-shelf tools fall short
- Per-production margin is spread across five spreadsheets that don't share a key
- Crew cost, gear hire, revenue, and schedule live in systems that don't reconcile
- Every board deck is a manual export-and-stitch that's stale on arrival
- Power BI or Tableau can't help because there's no clean data model underneath
Custom business intelligence dashboards: what Wellington teams actually get
A model-first BI build creates the shared data layer your tools never had, a common production key tying crew, gear, revenue, and schedule together, then puts live dashboards on top. The board's margin-by-production question gets a real-time answer, the manual stitching stops, and decisions get made on numbers that agree instead of a producer's recollection.
- Key numbers live in spreadsheets that don't share a model
- Board decks are manual export-and-stitch exercises
- Source systems don't agree on what a job or period is
- You need live answers, not month-old reconstructions
- Your data already lives clean in one system
- Off-the-shelf Power BI on that system answers your questions
- You don't need a custom data model or pipelines
- Your reporting needs are simple and stable
- A shared data model that finally reconciles crew, gear, revenue, and schedule on one key
- Live margin-by-production answers instead of five disagreeing spreadsheets
- Board decks that refresh themselves rather than being stitched by hand each month
- Drill-down from a headline number to the production and cost behind it
- A single source feeding ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), accounting, and project tools the same truth
- The hard, costly work is the data model and pipelines, not the pretty dashboards
- Garbage upstream data must be cleaned first, which can expose uncomfortable gaps
- Pipelines need maintenance as source systems change
- If your data is already clean and in one place, off-the-shelf BI may be enough
Feature priorities for Wellington teams
Wellington business intelligence dashboards: the full scope
Everything a business intelligence dashboards build here can cover: data visualization, Tableau alternative, Power BI, Looker, real-time analytics, KPI dashboards and data warehouse.
The honest cost picture for Wellington
| Project scope | Typical cost | Timeline |
|---|---|---|
| Data model and core dashboards | $50k to $90k | 3 to 4 months |
| With pipelines and self-refresh | $90k to $150k | 4 to 6 months |
| Full build with multi-system integration | $150k to $200k | 5 to 7 months |
Timeline: what happens, and when
Exactly what you get
The data model your tools never shared, a common production key reconciling crew, gear, revenue, and schedule, with live dashboards on top. The board's margin-by-production question gets a real-time answer, decks refresh themselves, and you drill from a headline number to the job behind it. It draws from your ERP, accounting software, and project management software so everyone argues from the same figures.
How to choose a developer in Wellington
Hire a team that treats the data model as the project and the dashboard as the easy last mile, because that order is where BI succeeds or fails. Ask how they'd unify five spreadsheets that don't share a key. Wellington's data-aware tech and gov sectors will see through a pretty chart on bad data, so insist the developer proves the modelling work first.
- !They focus on chart design before the data model. Ask how they'll unify your sources first.
- !They assume your data is clean. Ask what they'd do when sources don't reconcile.
- !No pipeline plan. Ask how data flows from Xero and project tools automatically.
- !No drill-down. Ask how a board metric traces back to a production and cost.
- !They quote a dashboard, not a model. Ask what underpins the numbers.
Most Wellington teams pricing business intelligence dashboards end up comparing notes on helpdesk & ticketing, erp, custom software too; the systems share one data spine.
Rohan advises mid-market and enterprise teams on ERP, CRM and custom software, and has led delivery on dozens of business-software builds.
Writes for Digital Heroes, shipping business software for 2,000+ brands across 55+ countries since 2017.
Frequently asked questions
Why can't we just buy Power BI?
Power BI and Tableau visualise a clean data model; they don't create one. A Wellington studio's margin lives in five spreadsheets that don't share a key, so the real work is building the unified model first. The dashboard is the easy last step.
What's the hardest part of a BI build?
The data model and pipelines, not the charts. Reconciling crew cost, gear hire, revenue, and schedule onto one production key, and cleaning the upstream data, is where the cost and value sit. A team focused on chart design first has the order wrong.
Can it give live answers?
Yes. With pipelines pulling from Xero, project tools, and job-costing sources, dashboards refresh themselves, so the board's margin-by-production question has a current answer instead of a month-old, hand-stitched deck.
What does a BI build cost in Wellington?
NZD 50,000 to 200,000 depending on how scattered your sources are, how much cleaning they need, and whether reporting self-refreshes. A model plus core dashboards is at the low end; full multi-system integration reaches the top.
Does it replace our ERP or accounting tools?
No. It sits on top, drawing from your ERP, accounting software, and project management software to give a unified view. Often a BI build runs alongside a job-costing or ERP project so the model and the source data improve together.