Reporting your team will read, act from and trust — connected to the systems you already run, not bolted on beside them.
Search for custom dashboard development in Australia and almost every result is a Power BI specialist. That is worth knowing, because it means the market has largely settled on one tool — and if that tool fits your business, you should use it. Drawn AI does something different. We build the dashboard as software: a reporting layer designed around your operation and connected to the systems you already run, rather than a licence resold with a template on top.
We are not a Microsoft partner and we hold no Power BI certifications. That is exactly why we can be straight with you about which of the two you need.
When Power BI is genuinely the right answer. You already pay for Microsoft 365. Your data sits in SQL Server, Dataverse, or Excel files on SharePoint. You want analysts to slice numbers themselves, build their own visuals and answer questions nobody has asked yet. Your user count is small, internal and stable, and somebody in the business is happy to own a data model. In that situation a good Power BI consultant will get you further, faster and cheaper than we will, and we will say so.
When a custom dashboard is the better buy. Your reporting has to be read by people who will never open a BI tool — a store manager on a Sunday, a supervisor at a site gate, a franchisee, a client. You want people to do something from the screen rather than only look at it. Your numbers need to be right now, not as at 2am. Your headcount is growing and per-seat licensing has started to shape who is allowed to see what. Or the people who need the numbers sit outside your organisation entirely.
One view across every store, branch, depot or site, with the same measures calculated the same way everywhere. Site managers see their own location; area managers see their group; you see all of it, ranked, without waiting for anyone to send a spreadsheet.
A store manager, a warehouse supervisor and a CFO want three different screens. We build each role the view it needs, with the filters already applied, rather than one dense report everyone has to learn to navigate.
A number that is wrong is only useful if someone can fix it. We embed the action next to the figure — reorder the stock, approve the variance, flag the site, assign the follow-up — so the dashboard is where work happens, not a read-only summary of work that happened.
For finance reporting, yesterday's data is fine. For a shift running now, it is not. Where the source allows it, we read live from Xero, Cin7, Shopify, SimPRO, Deputy or SQL Server, so the screen matches the floor.
Franchisees, contractors, suppliers and clients often need a slice of your reporting. Giving them a BI seat is usually impossible or expensive. A custom dashboard can expose exactly the rows they are allowed to see, on the web, with their own login — the same foundation we use to build customer portals.
Most useful questions cross systems: margin needs sales and cost, labour efficiency needs rostering and output. We join those sources into one set of definitions, so the number does not change depending on who exports it.
A paid discovery session where we work out what decisions the reporting is actually meant to support, who makes them and how often. This is where we tell you if Power BI or an off-the-shelf tool would serve you better. Our process analysis and discovery work goes deeper where the reporting problem is really a process problem.
We map where each number comes from, how it is currently calculated, and where the definitions disagree between teams. Most reporting disputes are definition disputes, and they have to be settled before anything is built.
We agree the views by role, the measures behind them and the actions each screen needs to support. You see the layouts before any code exists.
We build the dashboard and connect it to the source systems — accounting, POS, rostering, job management, your own database. Data we host for Australian clients sits in Australian regions.
Reporting changes as the business does. Under the subscription, we keep adjusting measures, adding views and fixing what the first three months of real use exposes. For businesses running several locations, the retail operations and mining pages cover the site-level reporting patterns we see most often. If your reporting lives in a workbook that has outgrown itself, start with replacing spreadsheets with custom software. If the underlying question is analytical rather than operational, our data analytics work is the better entry point.
Drawn AI works on a monthly subscription rather than a fixed project fee, with a minimum term of three months and 30 days' notice to cancel. The monthly figure depends on how many source systems are involved and how many role-specific views you need. We give you the number after discovery, before any build starts, so you are not committing to an open-ended estimate.
Sometimes, and it depends entirely on your user count. A handful of internal analysts is cheap to license and expensive to custom-build. Fifty site staff, or people outside your organisation, is the reverse. We will do that comparison honestly during discovery, including the case where the answer is that you should buy licences instead of hiring us.
The heaviest demand is at the start: a few hours of interviews and access to your systems during discovery and mapping. After that, most of the work happens away from your team. Because we read from the systems you already run rather than replacing them, nobody has to change how they enter data while the dashboard is being built.
Yes, and it is one of the most common reasons businesses come to us. We build one set of measures applied identically to every location, with permissions so each site sees its own performance and management sees the comparison. It removes the monthly exercise of collecting spreadsheets from each site and reconciling them by hand.
That is normal and it is not a blocker, but it does change the sequence. Where source data is inconsistent, we deal with it during the mapping step and tell you plainly what can be reported reliably now and what needs to be cleaned up first. A dashboard built on numbers nobody trusts gets abandoned, so we would rather fix the input than present the output.
A first conversation costs nothing and usually ends with a clearer idea of what is worth building — sometimes that answer is “not yet”, and we will say so.
No lock-in templates. Built around you.