Power BI consulting
Semantic models, documented DAX, and executive dashboards built by senior consultants with more than a decade of BI delivery behind them, not report painters. If your organization already runs on Microsoft 365, Power BI is the fastest route to reporting your leadership will actually trust.
Blue Peak Data Consulting works with counties, cities, police departments, public health departments, state programs and grant funded organizations across Kansas and Missouri, and remotely beyond both. Your data stays in your own Microsoft tenant, and the finished model is handed over so your staff can change it without calling us.
Production grade Power BI, end to end
Four pieces of work. A first project is usually one or two of them rather than all four.
Semantic modeling and DAX
Dimensional models, documented measures, time intelligence and performance tuning. This is the layer that makes every report fast and every number consistent, and it is the layer most struggling Power BI installations never got.
Row level security
The right people see the right slice. Program staff see their program, a division head sees their division, leadership sees everything, and a public view carries no record level detail at all. One model, governed access, rules written down so your IT staff can audit them.
Executive and program dashboards
Report pages designed around the decisions your leadership makes each week and the questions your board or council asks each month, refreshed on a schedule instead of assembled by hand.
Training and handoff
Documentation and working sessions so your own analysts extend the system instead of calling us for every change. If you never call us again, the reports keep refreshing on the schedule they were built with.
The Power BI problems we see most
Reports take minutes to load
Usually a modeling problem rather than a Power BI problem. A proper star schema, measures written once, and relationships that do not fan out will change how the same report behaves.
Every dashboard disagrees with every other one
Metrics defined per report instead of per model. We centralize the definitions so a case count, a caseload, a clearance rate or an award balance means one thing across every page that shows it.
Refresh failures nobody notices
A governed gateway, monitored refresh and alerting, so you find out a load failed before your finance director does.
Everyone exports to Excel anyway
When people export, the dashboard failed them. We find out what they were exporting to answer, then design the page around that question instead.
Power BI for counties, cities and public agencies
Most agencies already own the tool. If your county or city runs Microsoft 365, Power BI is sitting in the tenant, already paid for, and nobody has the fifteen spare hours a week it would take to build something real in it. So the monthly packet still gets assembled by hand. Here is what we build with it instead.
County and city leadership reporting
The monthly board or council packet as a live report: budget to actual by department, capital project status against schedule, permit and inspection volume, fund balance trends. Same layout every month, produced by a refresh rather than by a person.
Police and sheriff reporting
Calls for service by hour, day, beat and priority, incident and arrest counts, clearance status, and shift workload. That work has its own page: Power BI dashboards for police departments.
Public health programs
Case counts by condition and geography, clinic throughput and no show rates, immunization coverage by ZIP code, and program outcome measures reported on a state or federal award calendar.
Grant and program reporting
Spend against award, burn rate against period of performance, subrecipient rollups, and the performance measures your funder asks for, in the shape the funder asks for them. There is a working model of this on the site: the interactive grant command center.
State programs and workforce boards
Participant enrollment, service delivery and outcome measures, provider and subgrantee comparison, and the quarterly submission a state office expects, reconciled to the local count before it is sent.
A public transparency view
A separate, aggregated report carrying no case or client level detail, published only if and where your agency decides. Always its own decision and its own deliverable, never a side effect of the internal build.
The common thread is a recurring report with a deadline attached to it. If someone on your staff spends the first week of every month producing the same document, that is the first thing worth moving into Power BI, because the saving repeats every month and the definitions stop drifting.
Systems we work with
Microsoft 365 and the Power Platform
- Power BI Desktop and the Power BI Service
- Power BI semantic models and DAX measures
- Power Query for transformation
- Row level security and workspace governance
- SharePoint and Dataverse as report sources
- Power Apps and Power Automate where a report needs data captured or delivered
Databases and warehouses
- Microsoft SQL Server
- Azure and Azure Data Factory
- Amazon Redshift
- Oracle SQL, including pattern extraction from free text fields
- Tableau on SQL Server, where an agency already reports there
Files and line of business exports
- Excel workbooks your analysts already maintain
- CSV and scheduled exports from systems we have no direct access to
- Reporting views your software vendor already publishes
- Salesforce and other CRM extracts
- State submission files, for reconciling what you report against what you count
We will not claim familiarity with a records system, ERP or permitting platform we have not worked in. What we do instead is read your export, ask about every ambiguous field, and write down what each one means, so the next person does not have to ask. On a first project we usually do not need direct access to the source system at all.
How the work runs
Four phases, the same on every Blue Peak project (how we work). Each phase is its own written scope, its own acceptance and its own invoice.
Discovery
We map your sources, your reporting pain and your decision cycle, and agree what the first dashboard has to answer. You get a written scope and a written quote before anything is signed. If your own analyst could build it in an afternoon, this is where we say so.
Solution design
The data model and the measures get defined once: what counts as a case, what counts as closed, how a fiscal year behaves, which date drives the report. Definitions live in the model rather than in each page, which is why the numbers stop disagreeing. You review the design before any report page is built.
Implementation
Report pages get built against your real data and reviewed with you as they go, not presented for the first time at the end. Refresh, gateway and security get configured in your tenant, and failure alerting gets turned on before go live rather than after the first failure.
Optimization and handoff
Tuning after the first release, then you get the file, the documented measures, a written description of every source field, and a working session with whoever will maintain it. The model is yours. There is no hosted product to keep paying for and no code held back.
How a Power BI project is priced
Every project is quoted from a written scope before anything is signed. Tell us the report you need and we reply within one business day; the written quote comes with the scope. These are the sizes most projects take.
One report page from one clean export, published in your tenant, documented, with 30 days of tuning after go live. Our police crime statistics page starts here.
See the police pageOne report page and its model built on several sources, checked against the figures you already publish, with an update procedure, handoff documentation and a recorded walkthrough.
A small suite: several report pages, an analyst view with saved filters and a map, row level security, two or three sources. Each page set is accepted on its own.
Several subject areas, or a data pipeline underneath the reports. We split the work into phases, each with its own scope, quote, acceptance and invoice.
Refresh monitoring, small changes, new requests and a monthly check of the model. Starts after the 30-day tuning window, billed at the start of each month, month to month with 30 days’ notice.
The same plan with room for a new page or measure most months. For teams adding to the model as their questions grow.
What moves the fee: how many sources, how clean the exports are, how many pages, and whether row level security is needed. Your fee is the one quoted in your written scope. Licences are bought from Microsoft directly, and we take no margin on them. Each phase is its own invoice, Net 30, on acceptance.
Outside Kansas? We work remotely with agencies and businesses anywhere in the US. See how a remote engagement works.
Who does the work
Our senior consultants lead every build, and the consultant who scopes your dashboard is the one who builds it. Our lead consultant brings twelve years in production analytics, most of it in Power BI, SQL Server and the Microsoft stack.
That consultant led reporting on a $30M multi jurisdictional federal initiative from 2019 to 2022, building Tableau reporting on SQL Server, integrating grantee data across jurisdictions, and producing grant compliance reporting that passed federal funder review. At a national telecom the same consultant built an analytics product line used by more than 100 people, from executives to front line reps, and unified a sales pipeline spanning six source systems into one Power BI environment on Azure Data Factory and SQL Server.
That record was earned before Blue Peak was formed, so we describe it as our people’s experience rather than as the firm’s past performance, on purpose. What you get is the people who did that work, with no junior handoff.
Questions agencies ask
Do we already have Power BI, or do we have to buy it?
Check before you buy anything. Power BI Desktop, where the model is built, is free. Publishing and sharing reports needs a per user license or a capacity, and many agencies already have that bundled in their Microsoft 365 plan without knowing it. Your IT staff can confirm it in the admin center in a couple of minutes. If it turns out you do need licenses, you buy them from Microsoft directly. We do not resell them and take no margin on them.
How long does a first Power BI dashboard take?
Weeks rather than months for a first report against a single clean source, longer for a suite covering several subject areas with row level security configured. The clock is usually set by how quickly your IT staff can produce a clean export, not by the build itself. We put the timeline in writing during discovery, before anything is signed, and we would rather scope it small and ship it than promise a system.
Where does our data live, and who can see what?
It stays in your environment. Reports are built and published in your own Microsoft tenant, never copied to a Blue Peak server and never sent to an outside service for processing. Row level security controls who sees which slice, and the access rules are documented so your IT staff can audit them. Where data can be aggregated or stripped of identifiers first, that is the version we would rather have.
Who owns the model when the work is finished?
You do. Handover includes the Power BI file, the semantic model, the documented measures and a written description of every source field. Your analyst can open it, change it and republish it without us. There is no hosted product to keep paying for and no code held back.
Our reports are slow and our numbers disagree. Is that a Power BI problem?
Almost never. Slow reports are usually a modeling problem: flat tables instead of a star schema, measures recalculated inside every visual, relationships that fan out. Disagreeing numbers are usually a definitions problem: the same metric written three times in three reports, each with a slightly different filter. Both are fixable without changing tools, and finding out which one you have takes a look at the file rather than a project.
Do you work with agencies outside Kansas?
Yes. Blue Peak is based in Olathe, Kansas, works across the Kansas City metro and Missouri, and delivers remotely beyond both. The build happens inside your tenant, so distance changes nothing about the work. Blue Peak is a SAM.gov active small business, UEI PRPBEM9HEND3, CAGE 15CS5, registered under NAICS 541611, 541512 and 541690, and will complete whatever vendor registration your state or agency requires before an award. Here is how a remote engagement works.
Can you speed up a Power BI report we already have?
Yes. Our Power BI tune-up returns a slow report fast within five business days, with the same figures and a before-and-after timing sheet for every page we touched. Send a one-line note and we reply with a written quote the same business day.
More from Blue Peak
Analytics and reporting built for government work covers how Blue Peak contracts with public agencies, including UEI, CAGE and registered NAICS. Power BI dashboards for police departments is this same service written for a crime analyst, and the public safety demo is a working dashboard built on published city data you can check against the source. The other two service pages are SQL and data engineering, for the pipelines underneath the reports, and workflow automation and custom apps, for the manual steps around them.
Send us the report you hate producing
Name the recurring report that costs your team the most time. The monthly council packet, the quarterly grant submission, the board chart somebody rebuilds by hand every cycle. One line is enough, plus a rough figure for how long it takes today.
You get an honest read back within one business day: what it would take, roughly what it would cost, and whether it is worth doing at all. If your own analyst could build it in an afternoon, we will say so.