Insights

Field notes from the intersection of technology and finance.

Practical perspectives on modernising enterprise systems and the financial and tax decisions that ride alongside them.

Two dashboards that disagree? That's a governance problem, not a tooling one

Two dashboards that disagree? That's a governance problem, not a tooling one

When Finance trusts one revenue number and Sales trusts another, the fix is never a third dashboard. It's three unglamorous things underneath the tooling.

Turning your system into a SaaS? Get the isolation model right first

Turning your system into a SaaS? Get the isolation model right first

The hard part of going multi-tenant isn't the idea — it's the isolation model, and that decision is almost impossible to reverse later. Here's the checklist we run first.

Power BI or SSRS? You're probably asking the wrong question

Power BI or SSRS? You're probably asking the wrong question

Every year someone asks us to finally retire SSRS and move everything to Power BI. Most years that's the wrong move — because the two tools answer different questions.

The automation pattern hiding in the licence you already pay for

The automation pattern hiding in the licence you already pay for

Deadline-driven work that lives in a spreadsheet and one person's memory rarely needs a new system. The pieces are usually already in your Microsoft licensing.

What happens before we build a single Power Automate flow

What happens before we build a single Power Automate flow

Roughly half the automation requests we get are better solved by fixing the process than by building a flow. Here's the scoping work that happens first.

Why Copilot rollouts stall — and it isn't the licence

Why Copilot rollouts stall — and it isn't the licence

Most Copilot pilots stall for the same reason, and it's almost never the model. It's the permissions and governance estate underneath it.

Modernisation projects don't fail on technology

Modernisation projects don't fail on technology

In thirty years of enterprise delivery, almost no modernisation programme has failed on the technology. Here's what actually sinks them.

What the first two weeks of a legacy audit actually look like

What the first two weeks of a legacy audit actually look like

Before we touch a line of code on a legacy modernisation, we spend two weeks not writing any. Here's what those two weeks involve.

The transformation business case most SA boards never see

The transformation business case most SA boards never see

Most modernisation business cases model build cost well, and miss the two numbers that actually decide whether the investment pays off.