Data, reporting and insight

Reporting runs on Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform, in your own tenant, which means your team uses tools they may already have, your BI analyst can reach the data directly, and nobody is waiting on a supplier to build a report. Dashboards for membership, renewals, events, finance and engagement ship with the platform and are yours to change, so the first small alteration does not become a change request with a price on it.

Where an organisation runs Power BI, membership data is available to it directly rather than through an export. Board and Council reporting is built once and refreshes, which turns three days a quarter of rebuilding a deck into an afternoon of interpreting one. The harder and more valuable half is agreeing the definitions the report rests on, because a dashboard nobody trusts is worse than a spreadsheet somebody owns.

Batch import for contacts, qualifications and other records, used heavily during migration and afterwards for the things that arrive as spreadsheets from a branch, an exam board or a partner. Import runs with validation and a reconciliation position rather than silently, so you know what went in, what was rejected and why, instead of discovering six weeks later that a column was mapped wrongly.

Platform activity is recorded, and Dataverse carries its own audit history on membership records. Who changed a grade, when, and what it was before, which is the question that follows every membership dispute. It is also what a subject access request needs, and the difference between answering one properly and assembling a best guess from whatever anybody can remember.

Custom fields and custom entities where your organisation holds something the standard model does not cover. These extend the same schema rather than sitting in a parallel system, so they appear in reporting, in the portal and through the API like anything else. That is the whole point: an extension nobody can report on has solved a data-entry problem and created an information one.

Because membership data sits in your own Dataverse, your analysts can query it with the Microsoft tooling they already use. There is no data warehouse to buy and no export to schedule. It also means the answer to who owns this data is not a matter of interpretation: it is in your tenant, under your own agreement, and reachable by people who do not work for us.