What it is
Your numbers live in three places and someone copies them into a spreadsheet every Monday. I connect those systems to one place that refreshes on a schedule, tells you when a refresh fails, and feeds a simple dashboard. People in my trade call this ETL: extract, transform, load.
This is my day job. Building, scheduling and watching data pipelines is what I do for a living.
Who it’s for
Distributors, manufacturers, contractors and other operations businesses whose reporting is still copy-and-paste, and any small firm that wants its numbers in one place. It’s also the groundwork most AI projects need first: AI works on clean, consolidated data.
Examples
- Sales from QuickBooks and your CRM in one weekly dashboard.
- Spreadsheets from several locations rolled into one report that updates overnight.
- An export from your ERP joined to your other numbers, so nobody rebuilds it by hand.
What you get
- One to three data sources (for example QuickBooks, a CRM such as a customer-tracking system, or spreadsheets) loaded into one place: a small cloud database, a Google Sheet or a Power BI dataset.
- Scheduled refreshes.
- An alert when a refresh fails, so a broken number doesn’t sit in a report for a month.
- A simple dashboard.
- Written documentation: what runs, when, and where it gets its data.
I use an off-the-shelf data tool or standard database queries, not custom code, so you aren’t left depending on software only I understand.
How it goes
- A call about where your data lives and which numbers matter.
- Two to three weeks of building and testing, with a check-in each week.
- Handover: the dashboard, the documentation and a walkthrough.
Care plan (optional)
The pipeline is handed over working and documented, and it runs without this. The plan is for firms that would rather I watch it: I check the refreshes, fix a break when one happens and make small changes, for a monthly fee.
Terms
- Fixed price for up to three sources. More sources are quoted before work starts.
- If you already run a data warehouse such as Snowflake, Databricks or BigQuery and need new or repaired pipelines, there’s a larger version. Ask me.