What does it cost to have a dashboard built? Where the price really sits

"What does a dashboard cost?" is the first question I get. The honest answer is that the charts are the cheapest part. What sets the price is everything underneath.

That is why I do not give a price per dashboard. I do explain where the cost comes from, so you can judge for yourself which corner you are in.

Why two dashboards that look the same do not cost the same

Two businesses both ask for an overview of revenue, margin and outstanding invoices. On screen, both dashboards look almost identical.

For the first one, everything sits in one accounting package with a good connection. For the second, revenue sits in the till, purchasing in Excel, customers in another package, and every system names an article differently. The first is a matter of days. For the second, most of the work goes into bringing the data together and straightening it out, before a single chart exists.

You do not see that difference on screen. It is in the price.

The five things that set the price

The number of sources. Every source is a connection that has to be built, tested and maintained. One accounting package is something else than accounting plus till plus webshop plus payroll.

How easily those sources hand over their data. Some packages have a solid interface, others do not. You can read more about how that differs in connecting Exact and Yuki and connecting Odoo to Power BI. Sometimes an export is all there is, and then you need a reliable process around it.

The state of your data. Duplicate customers, articles without a category, discounts that disappear into the selling price. The more there is to straighten out, the more work up front.

How much history you want. Only this year is simpler than five years back, especially if the business switched packages along the way.

What is needed around the dashboard. Sometimes a dashboard is enough. Sometimes it turns out you first need an app to register something nobody keeps track of, or an automatic alert when something deviates. That is extra work, but it is often where most of the gain is.

What costs money besides the build

A dashboard runs on software, and that has its own price. For Power BI you pay Microsoft for licenses, per user who shares or views reports. Your own database to keep your data in usually costs a limited monthly amount. Ask with every proposal which of those costs are included and which come separately. They belong on paper before you start.

What to watch out for most

The risk is not the price of the build, it is a dashboard nobody believes anymore after three months. That happens when the numbers do not match the accounting, or when the connection quietly stops.

So ask with every proposal: who agrees with me on what revenue means? What happens when a connection fails? Who adjusts it when I switch till or package? Anyone without a clear answer to that is cheap until it goes wrong.

How I approach it

At Illustrated you pay nothing until the work really starts. The introduction is free. After that I come and listen in your business for at least a day, without interfering. That leads to a detailed plan: what sits where, what comes first, what can be automated. That is free too.

Only when you approve that plan do the work and the invoicing start. So you know in advance exactly what you get. You usually have the first results within two weeks, and a full project takes about two months. For the first two months after delivery I follow up for free.

The claim

Anyone who gives you a price for a dashboard without having seen your data is guessing. Either they guess high, or they guess low and you pay the difference later.