Hire a BI consultant

A BI consultant turns source data into reports you can use to make decisions. In Power BI, that means preparing data with Power Query, building a semantic model, defining calculations as DAX measures and creating reports for the people who use them.

On our staffing page, we call this role a BI specialist, alongside roles such as analytics engineer and data engineer. The right colleague depends on your tools and data.

A data engineer ensures data from source systems reaches the platform reliably, using pipelines and a data warehouse or lakehouse. The BI consultant then builds the model, definitions and reports on top of it.

If your sources are not yet accessible, you first need a data engineer. For large data volumes, Microsoft also recommends building a data warehouse first and connecting the Power BI model to it.

Because every visual in a report sends a query to the semantic model. Microsoft therefore recommends a star schema: dimension tables, such as customer, product and date, for filtering and grouping, and fact tables containing transactions for aggregation.

A model that mixes the two becomes slow and difficult to use. Explicit DAX measures also ensure everyone calculates revenue or margin in the same way.

With row-level security in the semantic model. You define roles using DAX filters, for example by region, and assign users or security groups from Microsoft Entra ID in the Power BI service. You can use "Test as role" to check what someone sees.

Note that this security applies only to users with the Viewer role. Anyone with higher permissions in the workspace can see all the data. The specialist agrees on this with your administrator before reports are shared widely.

By saving the work as a Power BI project (PBIP). The model and report are then stored as readable text files in Git, with version history and review. Deployment pipelines in Fabric move new content from development through testing to production, rather than sending it straight to users.

We document definitions of terms such as revenue or active customer in a place your team knows. We hand over knowledge when you want us to, not just at the end.

That depends on where the content is hosted. With a Fabric (Free) licence, you can only create reports for your own use. Sharing and collaborating requires a Pro or Premium Per User licence, unless the workspace runs on Premium or Fabric capacity. In that case, colleagues without a paid licence can also view the content.

Anyone who publishes reports, including the hired specialist, needs a Pro or PPU licence in your tenant.

Our BI specialists are employed by Data Science Lab, which assigns them to clients. You have one point of contact for selection, onboarding and follow-up, and the specialist can draw on colleagues in data engineering and data science.

With a freelancer, you assess their quality yourself. Since 1 January 2025, the Belastingdienst has resumed enforcement against false self-employment. As the client, you are responsible for determining whether the assignment is suitable for a self-employed professional.

If you want a completed report rather than extra capacity, have Power BI dashboards built as a project. If the problem lies with definitions or data ownership, another report will do little to help; start with data governance instead. If the work is ongoing, hire someone directly.

Want to compare providers first? See our overview of data analytics consultancies.