BI & Data Analytics
Find a boutique BI consultancy that can actually deliver a dashboard your team trusts. Honest pricing, scoped projects, no jargon.
Business intelligence (BI) consulting is the work of turning the data your business already produces into reports, dashboards, and analyses that leadership can actually use to make decisions.
It is not the same as data engineering (building the pipelines that move and store data), and it is not the same as data science (statistical modelling and prediction). A BI consultancy lives in the middle: they understand your data sources well enough to wire them up cleanly, and they understand your business well enough to make a dashboard that answers questions you actually have.
The buyers we see most often are heads of finance and COOs at Danish SMEs, usually 20 to 200 staff, often growing fast, almost always with an Excel reporting habit that has stopped scaling.
When you need bi & data analytics
You have outgrown spreadsheets, but not enough to justify a full data team. Most companies hit this point around 30 to 50 staff and a few million DKK in revenue, when there is enough data to matter but no one whose full-time job is making sense of it.
I have seen this go wrong when companies wait too long. The longer Excel reporting persists, the more politically loaded the numbers become. One team has their version, another has theirs, and leadership stops trusting any of them. By the time a BI project starts, the consultancy is not just building a dashboard; they are refereeing definitions of active customer and monthly revenue that should have been agreed two years ago.
The typical triggers: a new CFO joins and immediately asks for reporting that does not exist. Investor due diligence reveals the monthly board pack takes two days to assemble. A senior person quits and takes the Excel models with them. A failed BI project a year or two ago left bad memories and someone is now willing to try again. The company is preparing for fundraising and needs cleaner financial visibility.
Signs you're ready to bring in a consultancy
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Your weekly or monthly reporting takes someone a full day to assemble.
If a single person is the bottleneck for the numbers leadership sees, you are one resignation away from going dark.
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Someone in the company has said "I don't trust those numbers" in the last six months.
This is the most expensive sentence in business. It usually means two systems disagree, or two definitions of the same metric exist.
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You have tried Power BI yourself and got 70% of the way there.
Power BI's learning curve looks gentle at the start but gets steep when you hit data modelling. Most internal attempts plateau exactly there.
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You are about to hire a finance lead or data analyst and do not have the tools they will expect.
Modern finance and data hires expect a working BI stack. Onboarding them without one is a slow start.
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A previous BI project failed.
More common than people admit. The reasons are usually procurement-driven. A boutique re-engagement with clear scope often fixes this for a tenth of the original budget.
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You are heading into fundraising or M&A.
Acquirers and investors expect clean, queryable data. A BI project six months before a process saves real money in due diligence prep.
What good bi & data analytics looks like
A good BI consultancy does not start with Power BI. They start with a week of conversations.
The first deliverable should be a one-page document, sometimes called a data brief or metrics charter, that names the five to ten questions leadership actually wants answered, the systems where the data lives, and the definitions everyone has agreed on. If a consultancy skips this step and jumps to setting up a Power BI workspace, end the engagement. That is the project failing in slow motion.
Good consultants pick tools you can maintain, not tools that maximise their billable hours. For most Danish SMEs that means Power BI (because most are already on Microsoft 365) or Looker Studio (free, easier for smaller scopes). If someone insists on Tableau or Qlik for a 30-person company, ask why.
Good consultants build for handover from day one. Documentation, naming conventions, version control for data models. Boring discipline that means you can hire a junior analyst in eighteen months and they can pick up the work without rebuilding. A telltale sign of a bad consultancy: the dashboard works fine until they leave, then nothing makes sense and you are paying them again to knowledge transfer.
Good consultants are honest about what BI cannot do. A dashboard does not fix bad data entry, does not resolve organisational disagreements about strategy, and does not replace a finance team.
Warning signs to watch for: They quote without seeing your data sources. They pitch AI-powered dashboards without specifying what AI does in your context. They will not name the technologies they use until you sign. Their previous work is all under NDA.
What bi & data analytics costs in Denmark
A document showing what to build, in what order, on which stack. No working dashboard yet, but a buyable plan. 2-3 weeks.
One working dashboard (e.g. finance or sales) connected to live data, with handover documentation. 4-6 weeks.
A coherent set of dashboards (finance, ops, sales), shared data model, embedded analyst support during rollout. 3-4 months.
New data warehouse, full dashboard suite, governance setup, training. Usually only worth it at 100+ staff. 6-9 months.
Ready to get matched to a boutique firm?
How to choose a bi & data analytics consultancy
Look at their portfolio for shape, not for logos. A consultancy that has done five projects similar in scope to yours is more valuable than one that has done one for a famous brand. Ask for case studies that match your industry size and complexity.
Insist on meeting the senior person who will actually do the work. At many boutique consultancies the founder pitches and a junior delivers. That is fine if the junior is genuinely capable, less fine if you did not know. Ask explicitly: who will be in our weekly meetings?
Make them define success in writing before signing. A good consultancy will happily write three or four success criteria into the contract: the dashboard renders in under three seconds, leadership uses it weekly without needing the consultant, monthly board pack assembly drops to one hour. A bad one will resist.
Ask about handover from day one. What does the world look like three months after the project ends? If the answer involves them being on retainer indefinitely, that is a signal. Boutiques that respect their work want it to outlive them.
Trust your gut on stack choices. If a consultancy insists on a stack you have never heard of, the burden of proof is on them. Power BI, Looker Studio, Tableau, and Qlik are the four mainstream choices for a reason. dbt, BigQuery, and Snowflake are increasingly standard for the data-warehouse layer.
Frequently asked questions
The first useful dashboard usually goes live 4 to 6 weeks after kickoff for a focused single-dashboard engagement. A full BI implementation across multiple departments runs 4 to 6 months. Anything faster usually skips important scoping; anything slower usually means scope creep.
Most Danish BI projects are hybrid: one or two days per week on-site during the discovery phase, then largely remote during build, with weekly check-ins in person or on video. Fully remote works for smaller scopes but adds friction to scoping.
For most Danish SMEs already on Microsoft 365, Power BI is the default. It is bundled, well-supported, and the talent market is deep. Looker Studio is a strong free option for simpler use cases. Tableau is more expensive and slightly more powerful for advanced analytics; only worth it if you have specific needs the others cannot meet.
A good consultancy will preserve the logic from your Excel models while migrating the data to a proper source. The Excel files often disappear over the project; the analytical logic embedded in them survives in the dashboard and underlying data model.
More common than you would think. A boutique can usually rescue a stalled project for 30 to 50 percent of the original budget if the previous work has at least some documentation. Bring all the artefacts to the kickoff call.
Yes, and it often works better than either alone. A fractional CFO gives the BI consultancy the business context they need; the BI consultancy gives the CFO tools to actually use. Consulthero can match you to firms that have worked together before.
A consultancy delivers a system: dashboards plus documentation plus training that an internal team can then maintain. A full-time analyst delivers ongoing analysis but typically will not have the breadth to set up the underlying tooling. The two often follow each other in sequence.
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