Anytime Business Intelligence

09/30/2026

At most companies, the Power BI security model is a person in finance with a distribution list.

Build the report. Filter a copy for each manager. Email nine files. Do it again next month.

Nobody chose that system. It's what happens when one shared report can't be trusted to show each person only their own numbers.

The reason sits upstream of Power BI.

Row-level security, the feature that lets a CFO and a branch manager open the same report and see different rows, filters a table. The filter then travels through the model's relationships to everything connected to it. Microsoft's guidance says it in one line: RLS filters only propagate through active relationships.

Now look at one branch across a typical stack:

ERP: E100-COL
CRM: Columbus OH
Payroll: Dept 4410
Warehouse: WH-02

Four names for one building, and no shared list for a security rule to hold onto.

So teams write a rule per system and miss one. Or they build a report per region and watch the copies drift. Or they go back to the distribution list.

Map all four to one governed record and a single rule, Region = East, filters revenue, pipeline, labor and inventory at once. The CFO, two regional VPs, a branch manager and a board member open the same report. Each one sees their own rows. Nobody gets a file.

That's the order that works. Crawl gets every system to agree. Walk puts governed Power BI on top of it. Run points AI at the same model, under the same rules.

Security follows the model. Build the model first.

Full breakdown, including the five-view report table: https://bit.ly/4hFuILN

Power BI governance lives in the data model, not the admin portal. How normalized source data lets one set of row-level security rules govern every report.

09/16/2026

Seven students left early childhood. Seven left the upper school.

Same headcount. An $80,000 difference in net tuition.

Every retention report I see at a day school is built on headcount, so those two groups look identical on the page. One of them is worth $90,370 and the other is worth $170,352, and nobody finds out until the audit.

Here is why that happens, and it has nothing to do with anyone's effort.

Net tuition revenue per student takes three inputs:

Gross tuition billed, which lives in the tuition management system. Financial aid and remission, which lives in the aid platform, a committee spreadsheet, or a paper file. Enrolled students, which lives in the student information system.

Three systems. Three owners. Three refresh schedules.

The general ledger receives the result of all three, after the fact, as a summary entry with no student detail behind it. The only place those three numbers have ever met is a workbook somebody rebuilds every spring.

So the board gets one school-level discount rate. Say 17.5%.

No division in the school is at 17.5%. Early childhood is at 11%. The upper school is at 22%. That is an eleven-point policy spread hiding inside one average, and a tuition assistance strategy set against 17.5% is set against a number that describes nobody.

None of this is an accounting system problem. Sage Intacct is the right general ledger for a school, and the FACTS connected suite moves tuition payments into it cleanly. But a payment sync is a posting mechanism. It moves money. It does not carry the grade, the aid award or the re-enrollment status into a shape you can group by.

Connecting systems is the easy part now. Getting them to agree on what a student costs is the work.

Two numbers worth sitting with, from NBOA's five-year snapshot: average operating expenses per student reached $38,798 against $30,817 of net tuition. That is a $7,469 gap per student, and it widened at 80% of schools.

The annual campaign closes that gap. It is worth knowing which seats it is closing it for.

Full breakdown, including the division-level table above and how to calculate net tuition at risk during contract season: https://bit.ly/4reDOn3

Net tuition revenue per student ties enrollment, financial aid and retention into one number. Why your general ledger can't produce it, and what does.

08/26/2026

The job your team reviews every single week faded six-tenths of a point.

The two nobody reviews lost $1.67 million.

That's not a discipline problem. It's an attention-allocation problem, and it's structural: manual review is finite, so it goes to the biggest number on the page. The $24M interchange gets a weekly forecast. The $6.4M widening gets one at close.

Here's the part that makes it expensive in heavy civil specifically.

CFMA's 2025 Benchmarker puts heavy construction net income before tax at 8.3% of revenue. Standard retainage is 5–10% of contract value.

Read those two numbers together. The retainage balance on a typical civil job is worth 60% to 120% of the profit that job will ever produce.

So profit fade doesn't reduce your margin. It consumes a balance you haven't collected, can't easily influence, and won't see until final acceptance.

Which is why fade and retainage aren't two topics. They're one number:

Margin at Risk = retainage held ÷ current estimated gross profit at completion

Every point of fade pushes it up automatically — fade shrinks the denominator while the retainage numerator sits exactly where it was. Past 100%, the owner is holding more money than the job has profit left in it.

And none of this is an ERP failure.

Sage Intacct Construction's WIP feature does what it says: automates the monthly WIP statement, posts the over/under billing entries, reports margin movement. But percent complete is cost-to-date divided by estimated cost at completion — a fact divided by an opinion. The fact posts continuously. The opinion gets revised once a month, by a PM, during close, across a dozen jobs. Often in a system that isn't the ERP at all.

If one input arrives monthly, the output is monthly. However fast the ERP runs.

Full breakdown — including the four-job table above and how to read Margin at Risk per job: https://bit.ly/4gB5IF1

Profit fade is a reporting-latency problem, not an estimating one. How real-time WIP and retainage visibility catches margin erosion while you can still fix it.

08/12/2026

This post prices the in-house build honestly, then shows what a data warehouse for small business looks like when the maintenance load isn’t yours to carry.

A data warehouse for small business no longer requires hiring a data team. Here’s the real year-one cost of building one in-house — and how to skip it.

07/15/2026

Every stage of the SMB data maturity curve rests on the same thing: data you can trust. Crawl means fixing data integrity, walk means visual reporting on validated data, and run means enterprise AI enablement.

https://bit.ly/4wDLXCW

The SMB data maturity curve moves from data integrity to visual reporting to enterprise AI. Why skipping a stage is why most AI projects fail — and how to climb it.

07/01/2026

You didn’t outgrow ICRW — you outgrew reporting that can only see your general ledger.

https://bit.ly/4vbNQWd

Hitting Sage Intacct reporting limitations with ICRW? See where the Interactive Custom Report Writer stops and how a managed BI alternative picks up.

06/12/2026

Most partners help organizations implement an ERP. and help membership organizations build a governed financial intelligence platform on top of it

https://bit.ly/3PVhVLu

anytimeBI's Revenue Bridge and Net at Work turn fragmented dues, remittances, and bank activity into accounting-ready revenue inside Sage Intacct—ending the manual reconciliation that drains association and union finance teams

06/02/2026

is seeking a tech-savvy professional to train end users on an accounts receivable credit and collections software solution.

Email: [email protected]

05/06/2026

Think of as the intelligence layer between your fund ledger and your fiduciary decisions, it sits on top of

https://bit.ly/4cVstTv

Nonprofit CFOs face increasing pressure to deliver accurate, real-time insights. Discover how anytimeBI and Sage Intacct work together to transform endowment tracking and board reporting into a powerful intelligence system.

04/15/2026

does not start with AI hype. It starts with data integrity, grows into BI reporting, and ends with enterprise-ready AI that actually has something meaningful to work with.

https://bit.ly/3OtEjup

Discover how anytimeBI helps organizations move from fragmented data silos to governed BI reporting and enterprise-ready AI with a secure single source of truth.