Oklahoma Data Partners Services
Power BI Consulting
Power BI dashboards your team trusts, opens, and uses.
Power BI consulting from Oklahoma Data Partners gets you dashboards that show the right numbers, load fast, and update themselves. Power BI is Microsoft's tool for turning business data into interactive charts and reports. We set up the data model underneath, build the dashboards, sort out licensing, and fix reports that have become slow or untrusted, for companies in Oklahoma City, Tulsa, and across Oklahoma.
Executive Dashboard
Power BI · refreshed daily
Revenue
$4.2M
Margin
31%
On-time
96%
Plain terms
What a Power BI dashboard is, in plain terms
A Power BI dashboard is a single web page that shows your most important business numbers as tiles and charts, pulled automatically from your own systems. Instead of opening four spreadsheets to answer "how did last week go?", a manager opens one link on a laptop or phone and sees sales, margin, and backlog side by side, already updated.
Dashboard vs report: the simple difference
In Power BI, a report is the detailed, multi-page workspace where you filter, drill down, and explore one subject, such as every invoice by customer and month. A dashboard is the one-page summary that pins the key tiles from one or more reports in a single place. Think of the report as the filing cabinet and the dashboard as the summary taped to the front of it. Most companies need a few well-built reports and one dashboard per audience.
Sound familiar?
When Power BI was bought but never really landed
A common story: someone in finance built the first Power BI report two years ago by connecting straight to a few Excel exports. It worked. Then more pages were added, more people asked for changes, and the file grew. Today it takes a minute to load, the refresh fails every few weeks, and the sales total does not match the one in the accounting system. The person who built it has moved roles, and nobody else wants to touch it.
The tool is not the problem. What is missing is a proper foundation: clean source data, a data model designed for reporting, measures defined once, and a refresh that someone monitors. That is what Power BI consulting puts in place, so the dashboards earn back the trust they lost.
What we build in Power BI
Every dashboard sits on a clean, documented data model, so the numbers match from one page to the next.
Executive dashboards
The five to seven numbers leadership steers by, with targets and a click-through to the detail.
Sales dashboards
Pipeline, bookings, win rates, and rep performance pulled straight from your CRM.
Finance dashboards
Revenue, margin, budget versus actual, and cash connected to your accounting system.
Operations dashboards
Orders, inventory, production, or service tickets refreshed often enough to act on during the day.
Data models and DAX
The organized tables and DAX formulas (Power BI's calculation language) that make every measure consistent.
Workspaces and refresh
Secure sharing, row-level access, and scheduled refresh so the right people see current data.
Licensing
Power BI licensing, explained simply
Licensing decides who can build, share, and view dashboards. The short version: anyone who publishes or shares content needs at least a Pro license, and viewers need either their own paid license or access through a large enough capacity.
| License | Who it is for | Vendor list price (Oct 2026) |
|---|---|---|
| Power BI Pro | People who build and share reports, and viewers in companies without a qualifying capacity. Most small and mid-size businesses start here. | $14 per user per month, paid yearly |
| Premium Per User (PPU) | Teams that need larger datasets, more frequent refresh, and advanced features, licensed person by person. | $24 per user per month, paid yearly |
| Capacity (Fabric F SKUs, legacy Premium P) | Larger organizations that want many people to view content without per-user viewer licenses. Free viewing requires F64 or larger, or an existing P1 or higher. | Priced by capacity size; see Microsoft |
These are Microsoft's published vendor prices as of October 2026, not our fees. Sources: Microsoft Power BI pricing and Microsoft Fabric licensing. Microsoft is consolidating legacy Premium P capacity purchasing toward Fabric F capacities, so new buyers should plan around F SKUs. Capacities smaller than F64 still require paid per-user licenses for viewers.
For most companies under a few hundred users, Pro for everyone who needs access is the simplest answer. We look at your actual headcount and usage before recommending anything bigger.
Honest comparison
Power BI vs Tableau: an honest comparison
Both are excellent. The right choice depends on what you already own, who will use it, and how many viewers you have.
| Power BI | Tableau | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost per user (vendor list, Oct 2026) | Pro $14 per user per month; Premium Per User $24 | Creator $75, Explorer $42, Viewer $15 per user per month billed annually; at least one Creator required |
| Ease of use | Feels familiar to Excel users; ribbon menus and Microsoft sign-in | Drag-and-drop exploration that analysts love; a learning curve for casual users |
| Best fit | Companies already on Microsoft 365, Excel, Teams, SQL Server, or Azure | Teams that want deep visual exploration and have dedicated analysts |
| Visualization depth | Strong standard visuals plus a marketplace of custom ones | Very flexible, highly polished visual design and exploration |
Vendor list prices as of October 2026, not our fees: Microsoft Power BI pricing and Tableau Cloud pricing.
We build in both. Here is how to choose: if your people live in Microsoft tools and cost per viewer matters, start with Power BI. If you have analysts who will explore data every day and visual depth matters more than license cost, Tableau earns its price. If you are unsure, our data analytics consulting starts with that decision.
Troubleshooting
Why is my Power BI report slow?
Slow reports almost always come from a handful of causes, and most are fixable without new licenses:
- One giant flat table instead of a star schema, which is a tidy layout with one central table of transactions surrounded by small lookup tables like customer and date.
- Importing every column and every year of history when the report only uses a few.
- DAX measures written in ways that force Power BI to recalculate row by row.
- Too many visuals on one page, each sending its own query.
- A slow source database underneath a DirectQuery connection, where Power BI asks the database live on every click. That one is a database performance tuning job.
We measure first using Power BI's Performance Analyzer and the model's own statistics, then fix the biggest causes in order and write down what changed.
Engagement
How a Power BI engagement works
- 1
Discovery call
We learn who needs which numbers and look at any existing reports.
- 2
Data and licensing review
We check source systems, data quality, and the licenses you have, and flag gaps.
- 3
Model and first dashboard
We build the data model and the most valuable dashboard first, with your team reviewing as we go.
- 4
Refresh, security, and rollout
Scheduled refresh, row-level security, and sharing are set up and tested.
- 5
Training and support
Your team gets hands-on training and documentation, with optional ongoing help.
The Pipeline Story
Where Power BI sits: Stage 5, turning data into answers
Power BI is where the answers show up. Before that, data is pulled in and cleaned by data engineering, stored in a data warehouse, and kept healthy by database administration. If those stages are shaky, the dashboard will be too.
Local
Power BI help from an Oklahoma firm
We are in Oklahoma City and meet clients on-site in OKC and Tulsa when a requirements session or training day works better in person. Our Power BI work reflects the state's mix of industries: production and lease reporting for energy companies, census and payer dashboards for healthcare, portfolio views for banks, on-time and cost-per-mile tracking for logistics, and throughput and scrap for manufacturers. Public agencies get dashboards built for reporting they have to defend.
Tools
Platforms and technologies we work with
- Power BI Desktop, the Power BI service, and Microsoft Fabric workspaces.
- SQL Server, Azure SQL Database, and Azure Synapse Analytics as data sources.
- Snowflake, BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, and PostgreSQL through native connectors.
- Excel, SharePoint, CSV files (plain comma-separated exports), and ERP (finance and operations) and CRM (customer and sales) systems such as Dynamics 365 and Salesforce.
- Tableau, when a side-by-side comparison or migration is part of the decision.
Questions
Frequently asked questions
Related data services
Related services
Further reading
- Power BI reporting problems in Oklahoma
- Why Power BI dashboards fail when data is not clean
- Power BI vs Tableau in 2026: Cost, Ease of Use, and Which One Your Business Actually Needs
- What Does a Business Dashboard Really Cost? Build Prices, Licensing, and Timelines
- Still Building Reports by Hand Every Monday? How to Automate Your Weekly Reporting
- What Should a CEO Dashboard Show? The 5–7 Numbers That Matter
- Do You Need a Data Warehouse to Use Power BI? (And When You Do)
Want reporting your team will actually trust?
Let's build Power BI dashboards on a foundation of clean, well-modeled data.
Schedule a Data Consultation