Questions worth asking before you hire anyone.

To quote: one representative file or page — the messy one, not the tidy one. To build: the sources behind it, in whatever format they already exist. Excel, CSV, Google Sheets, a system export, a PDF or a scan all work. We will tell you what is needed before any full-file transfer, and we would rather see a small sample first than a full dataset we have not yet agreed to handle.

Yes to both. We will sign your NDA — we do not currently offer a template of our own, so yours governs. For anything sensitive, tell us before you send it and we will agree how it gets transferred. Where the analysis does not need identifying fields, we would rather you remove them than trust us with them. We do not publish client data or screenshots without written permission, and we do not claim encryption, ISO, SOC 2 or HIPAA controls, because we have not implemented them.

Because we have not built file storage we are willing to make promises about. Until we have, a share link you control — Google Drive, OneDrive, WeTransfer — is safer for you than an upload box on a marketing site: you can see who opened it and you can revoke it. Ask us on the form and we will send an address to share with.

That is usually the cheapest place to start. We look at the workbook you are using, tell you which parts are worth keeping, and rebuild only what is failing. Replacing a working file wholesale is rarely the right answer and we will say so if it is not.

Only if it was scoped to. A one-time report answers a question at a point in time; a refreshable one needs the source to arrive in a consistent shape each period, and it is built differently. Tell us at the scoping stage which you want — converting the first into the second afterwards costs more than building the second outright.

Formulas calculate inside the sheet and recalculate on their own. Power Query imports and reshapes data before it reaches the sheet, and repeats those steps on demand — it is the right tool for most "the same import every month" work. VBA is code that automates actions Excel has no other way to perform; it is powerful, harder to maintain, and blocked by many IT policies. We reach for Power Query first and only propose VBA when nothing else will do.

Stay in Excel while one or two people read the report, the data fits comfortably in a workbook, and the refresh can be someone opening a file. Move to Power BI when several people need the same view, the workbook has become slow, the report has to work on a phone, or the refresh has to be scheduled rather than remembered. We assess this before we quote and will tell you to stay in Excel when that is the honest answer — it costs you less and needs no licence.

Yes, and you buy them directly from Microsoft — they are not resold through us. Which licence depends on how you share the report and with whom, so we confirm your position during assessment rather than after the build. We are not a Microsoft partner and do not present ourselves as one.

Tell us your version before we start; it changes what we can build. Microsoft 365 and Excel 2021 support dynamic arrays and the newer functions, and older versions do not. If your organisation blocks macros, say so at scoping — it rules some approaches out and we would rather know at the start than at handover.

Every package states its own allowance, and it is on the package card rather than buried in terms. A revision means a correction against the scope we agreed. A new requirement is a change request, priced separately — we will always tell you which one we think it is before doing the work, not after.

What affects it: volume, source quality, the number of separate sources, how much cleanup is needed before the real work starts, and whether a refresh mechanism is in scope. Why nothing is published: this is a new practice, and a rate published before we understand our own delivery times would be a number we could not stand behind. We quote after seeing a sample, and the quote does not move unless the scope does.

We give a date with the quote, once we have seen a sample — not before. Any estimate given without seeing the data is a guess, and guesses on this kind of work are wrong in one direction. Every package states what its timeline assumes, so you can see what would move it.

You do. You get the working file, not a locked export — the workbook, the queries, the measures, the editable deck. If you stop working with us, nothing stops functioning and nothing needs our permission to change.

A handover walkthrough is included on anything built to be refreshed, and we ask your nominated person to run the refresh once themselves, with us watching, before we close the engagement. That last step is the difference between a system that survives and one that quietly stops being used.

Yes, as Managed Refresh, and on a cadence we can actually hold. We would rather decline a weekly commitment than take one and miss it, so availability is confirmed engagement by engagement rather than sold as an open subscription.

We do not build software or databases, administer your Microsoft tenant, resell licences, do bookkeeping or audit, or guarantee a business outcome before seeing the data. We do not develop VBA as a default — it is assessed case by case. We do not design presentations for analysis we did not run. Every service page lists its own exclusions alongside its inclusions.

Not yet, and we are not going to manufacture any. What we can show is documented analytical work on real datasets — the four case studies under Projects — and we label them as case studies rather than client engagements, because that is what they are. When permissioned client work exists it will appear in the same list, marked as such.