Questions worth asking before you hire anyone.

What moves it: how much data there is, how clean it is, how many separate sources it comes from, and whether the report has to refresh every period. We quote a fixed figure after seeing one sample file, in writing, and it does not change unless the scope does.

Send a sample and you get a written quote with a delivery date within one working day. The date depends on the data, so we give it after seeing a sample rather than guessing before. Each package lists what its timeline assumes.

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.

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.

No named references or testimonials yet, and we are not going to manufacture any. There is one case study from a real engagement, with the client's identity removed, at makemymis.com/work — the files we received, what was wrong with them, what we fixed and the report it produced. When a client agrees to be named, their work will appear here marked as client work. The most useful evidence is still a small first piece of work on your own sample, scoped and quoted in writing before it starts.

Yes, as Managed Reporting, 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.

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.

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.

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.

So your files stay in your control. Share a Google Drive, OneDrive or WeTransfer link instead: you choose who can open it and you can switch it off when the work is done. If a link is not possible, ask on the form and we will send an address to share with.

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. We hold no formal security certifications — if you need one, tell us early.

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.