Your Monday numbers, ready before anyone logs in
No more exporting, pasting, and rebuilding the same spreadsheet every Monday. One dashboard pulls from your systems on a schedule. It shows the numbers your leaders actually use, and it stays the version everyone trusts.
Who spends their Monday building your numbers?
- One person exports from your ERP or accounting system and rebuilds a spreadsheet every week.
- When that person is out, the numbers don't get made.
- Sales, operations, and finance each keep their own version of the truth.
- Leaders ask a follow-up question and wait two days for the answer.
Think of a 70-person wholesale distributor. Orders, inventory, and invoicing live in NetSuite. Margin targets and rep quotas live in Excel. Every Monday the operations manager spends the morning exporting saved searches and pasting them into a workbook. Then she fixes the formulas that broke since last week. The dashboard build moves that work to a scheduled refresh. Monday's meeting opens with current sales, margin by customer, and open orders already on the screen.
Why is a dashboard priced as a range?
A dashboard reading one Google Sheet is a different job from one joining NetSuite, a target spreadsheet, and a CRM through a data warehouse. Three things set your price. How many sources need connecting? How many pages and audiences? Does your data need cleaning and a home first? Raquel quotes the exact figure after the discovery call.
How does a dashboard build run?
- 01Decide what the dashboard must answer
- 02Connect and check the data sources
- 03Model the data for refresh
- 04Build the views and test them with your team
- 05Launch, train, and hand over
All the steps, in detail
- Raquel meets your decision owner to list the questions the dashboard must answer each week.
- She reviews the spreadsheets you build today. They show exactly which numbers people rely on.
- You pick the tool together: Tableau or Looker Studio, based on licenses, budget, and who will use it.
- She connects each source through a direct connector, a scheduled export, or a warehouse such as BigQuery or Snowflake.
- She writes and validates the SQL or transformations so the totals tie out to your system of record.
- She sets the refresh schedule and an alert for when a refresh fails.
- She builds the views: one summary page for leadership, then detail pages by team.
- Your team uses a test version for one week and reports what's missing or confusing.
- She revises, documents every metric and source, and locks down who can see what.
- A training session shows your team how to filter, drill in, and answer their own follow-up questions.
What does the dashboard build include?
- A working dashboard in Tableau or Looker Studio, refreshing on a schedule
- Data connections to your systems, through a connector, a scheduled export, or a warehouse
- Validated queries whose totals match your system of record
- A metric reference page built into the dashboard
- Refresh failure alerts sent to a named person
- Access settings by role
- A 60-minute training session, recorded for new hires
- Handover notes covering how to change a filter, add a field, or fix a broken refresh
Need reports sent to clients instead of a screen your team checks? See automated reporting.
What you get, what this is not, and what you need to bring
What you get
- One version of the weekly numbers, built without anyone's Monday morning
- Totals that tie out to NetSuite, QuickBooks, or whichever system you trust most
- A team that can answer its own follow-up questions instead of queuing for one person
What this is not
- Not software licenses. Tableau, Looker Studio, warehouse, and connector costs are billed by those vendors. Raquel tells you the likely cost before you commit.
- Not a fix for numbers nobody has defined. If leaders disagree on what a metric means, the KPI framework comes first.
- Not unlimited dashboards. The scope covers the pages agreed at kickoff.
- Not a data cleanup of years of duplicate records. That's a separate data cleaning project if it's needed.
What you need to bring
- A decision owner who can say which numbers matter most
- The spreadsheets currently used to build your weekly numbers
- Admin access, or an IT contact who can grant it, for each source system
- Three to five people willing to test the draft for a week
Raquel has seen that last one work in-house: her Tableau self-serve reporting platform cut ad hoc report requests by 40%.
Five questions that set the price
- How many systems need to feed the dashboard?
- Do you already have a data warehouse, or does one need setting up?
- How many audiences need their own view: leadership, sales, operations, finance?
- Do you have Tableau licenses already, or is Looker Studio the better fit?
- How often does the data need to refresh: daily, hourly, or weekly?
Price
- What moves it
- Source systems, whether a warehouse is needed, number of views, and refresh frequency
- Payment terms
- Half to start the build, half when the dashboard goes live
What if it isn't worth it?
You get the exact figure after the discovery call, and the likely license costs before you commit. Your team tests the draft for a week before it goes live.
Questions people ask before booking
Tableau or Looker Studio: which one should we use?
Looker Studio is free and works well on Google Sheets and BigQuery for smaller teams. Tableau costs more per user. In return it handles bigger data, more complex views, and finer access control. If you already pay for one, that usually decides it.
Do we need a data warehouse?
Not always. If your data fits in a few Google Sheets and refreshes daily, a warehouse adds cost without much benefit. Joining several systems or millions of rows? Then BigQuery or Snowflake keeps the dashboard fast and the numbers consistent.
Who keeps it running after launch?
The handover notes are written for a non-analyst. Refresh failures alert a named person on your team. If you'd rather not own it, the fractional analyst retainer can cover upkeep.
Has Raquel built dashboards like this before?
Yes. In an in-house role at an eCommerce company, Raquel built Tableau dashboards that served as the single source of truth for executives. Her self-serve Tableau reporting platform there reduced ad hoc report requests by 40%. People could answer their own questions.