Bury sits in a useful spot. Close enough to Manchester to share a labour market, far enough out to have its own character, and home to a healthy mix of family run manufacturers, distribution businesses, professional services firms and the public sector around Fairfield General. A lot of those organisations have grown through acquisition or organic expansion and ended up with data living in two or three different finance systems, a CRM, a couple of operational tools and the inevitable shared drive. That is usually where we come in.
We tend to start with the report that is causing the most pain. Often that is the monthly board pack, or the weekly sales and margin view, or a stock and ageing report somebody has been pasting together from three exports. We rebuild it once, properly, so it refreshes itself. From there it is usually obvious which piece of reporting work is worth tackling next, and whether your team needs a hand with interactive dashboards or just a tidier set of weekly views.
A lot of Bury teams already have Power BI as part of their Microsoft 365 setup and have never really used it. The licences are paid for, the data is there, and one or two people on the team have had a go but never had the time to finish. Our Power BI training sessions are pitched at exactly that situation. Small group, on your own data, walking out at the end of the day with a working report rather than a certificate.
For manufacturers we spend a fair amount of time joining shop floor or production data to finance, so that gross margin is not a guess at the end of the month. For professional services and agencies we tend to focus on utilisation, pipeline and project profitability. The systems differ, but the principle is the same. One model, documented properly, with the numbers everyone in the meeting agrees on.
We also do quite a bit of quiet remedial work. Workspaces that have grown a bit messy, datasets that nobody is sure are still being refreshed, reports built by someone who has since left the business. If that sounds familiar, a short discovery exercise usually gets things back on a sensible footing without throwing away the work that already exists.
We cover Bury and the surrounding boroughs in Bolton, Rochdale, Oldham and the wider Manchester area, so if your team is spread across sites we can handle that. Drop us a line and we will come back the same working day with an honest first step, not a sales pitch.