Centralised Power BI Reporting for
Turf Management Group
Executive
Summary
A national turf management group with five independent businesses needed a unified and consistent method of accessing financial and sales data. Each business used different financial and operational systems, including MYOB Exo, Xero, and custom-built invoicing systems. As a result, the executive team only gained consolidated insights through external accountants after a 3-month lag following the reporting period.
Designpluz built a cloud-based data analytics platform using Microsoft Azure. The platform automatically collects data from all systems, normalises and harmonises financial structures, and stores seven years of history in Azure Data Lake. It provides real-time insights through Power BI dashboards.
The platform provides nightly data refreshes, entity-level and group-level visibility, sales tracking, budget versus actual reporting, and traffic-light KPIs. The solution transformed the client’s reporting environment from fragmented, delayed, and labour-intensive to consolidated, accurate, and near-real-time.
The Challenge
The organisation managed turf production, landscaping, and maintenance services through several independent businesses. Their technology stack consisted of multiple MYOB Exo systems, Xero accounting software, custom invoicing systems, and spreadsheets used for budgets, sales targets, and reconciliations.
This fragmented structure created several challenges:
- No unified financial model across group companies
- Different chart of accounts and reporting structures
- Limited visibility into daily or weekly sales performance
- Delayed consolidated financial results by months after the period close
- Spreadsheet consolidation leading to inconsistent results
- Limited ability to analyse year-over-year performance trends
- Budgets maintained as spreadsheets without the ability to compare to actual results
- Sales teams without visibility into customer history
Because of these challenges, management lacked the timely information needed for operational planning, financial governance, and performance management.
The Solution
Our team of consultants and developers built a centralised analytics platform to resolve these problems. The solution was designed with four goals in mind: data consolidation, standardisation, real-time information, and increased efficiency.
Data Consolidation
The platform automatically consolidated data from MYOB Exo, Xero, and various operational systems into Azure Data Lake. This provided a common data set across the group and eliminated the need for manual data consolidation processes.
Standardisation and Harmonisation
We worked on developing a unified financial and sales data model to standardise reporting across all group entities. This included mapping differing chart of accounts structures, balancing entity balance sheets, and standardising customer and sales data. Our team consolidated around seven years of historical data for long-term trend analysis.
Real-Time Visibility
Our team created Power BI dashboards with the objective of providing near-real-time information regarding financial and business performance. This included profit and loss reporting, balance sheet analysis, sales reporting on representatives, customers, and entities, budget vs actual reporting, customer purchasing trends, and KPI monitoring using traffic-light indicators. We ensured that the dashboards could be accessed through desktop devices as well as the Power BI mobile application.
Operational Efficiency
We designed a secure portal that allowed finance teams to upload budgets, sales targets, and KPI ranges. These inputs were integrated directly into the reporting environment for automated benchmarking and variance analysis.
Tech Stack Used
Technical Architecture
On a nightly basis, the data is ingested from MYOB Exo, Xero, custom invoicing applications, and uploaded spreadsheets. Azure Logic Apps standardise the data formats before storing the data in Azure Data Lake.
Azure Functions transform the data by mapping the chart of accounts, balancing the balance sheets across the entities, and normalising the customer and sales structures.
Aggregated reporting models, created on Azure SQL, maximised the performance of the analytics queries. Power BI semantic datasets were used for the dashboards to represent data in an easy-to-visualise way for executives, finance team members, and sales managers.
Business Outcomes
With our thoughtfully-designed solution, the organisation achieved several benefits from the portal, including:
Key outcomes included
The platform now supports faster decision-making, improved financial planning, and stronger performance management across the turf management group.
I have been delighted with the service offered by Designpluz. Over the whole process, from initial design to implementation, delivery and iteration they have been professional, responsive and highly helpful.
Developing a specialised AI product in a highly regulated environment is no small task, and I would thoroughly recommend Designpluz. Huge thanks in particular to Shaun, but also to Jag, Murugesan and the rest of the team. Strongly recommend this team.
