Fixed-fee reporting for mission-driven organizations
A fixed-fee build for organizations whose numbers are spread across a donor CRM, the accounting system and a folder of grant spreadsheets: restricted-fund and grant burn tracking, program outcome reporting, donor retention and lapsed-donor views, and a board pack that no longer takes a week to assemble. One written price, typical delivery in 2–4 weeks, 30 days of hypercare included.
Representative dashboard — sample data
What you get
Every build covers the questions a mission-driven organization actually gets asked, not a generic KPI template.
Restricted, temporarily restricted and unrestricted money are modelled apart, so spend-to-date, remaining balance and burn rate against the award period are visible per grant instead of reconstructed at quarter end.
Service counts, attendance and the outcome measures your funders ask about are tied back to the program and the cohort, so delivery can be compared against what the award actually committed you to.
Retention by cohort, recurring-gift attrition, average gift trend and a lapsed-donor list your development team can act on this month — rather than a total-raised figure that hides who stopped giving.
Fixed report pages built to the shape your board deck and grant reports already use, exportable to PDF, so the same numbers go to the finance committee and the funder without a manual rebuild.
Gift data from Raiser’s Edge, Salesforce NPSP or Dynamics 365 is joined to fund and grant codes from the accounting system, so development and finance stop arguing about which total is right.
Row-level security keeps program staff, development and finance in their own view of one governed model, and written documentation means a small team can keep it running without us.
How it works
A free consultation covers the funder report or board pack that takes longest to assemble, where the grant, gift and program data lives today, and who needs to see what. We reply with a written scope, one fixed fee and a delivery date.
We pull from the CRM, the accounting system and the program spreadsheets in between, build the semantic model, write the measures, and reconcile fund balances and gift totals against the statements your finance lead already signs off.
We publish to your governed workspace with role-based access, walk development, program and finance staff through their own views, hand over documentation, and stay on for 30 days of included hypercare.
Most nonprofits are not short of data. The CRM holds constituents and gifts, the ledger holds fund and grant codes, and program staff keep attendance and outcome counts in a spreadsheet or a Microsoft Form. The problem is that no single system answers the question a funder or a board asks — how much of this award is left, what did it deliver, and are the donors who paid for it still with us. The work is engineering the layer underneath: connecting those sources, agreeing the definitions, and modelling them so the numbers hold up under scrutiny. Microsoft’s own Power BI documentation (opens in new tab) describes the platform’s data, model, report and service layers, and a reporting pack that survives an audit needs all four built deliberately.
Definitions decide these projects. Whether a multi-year pledge counts in the year it was promised or the year it was paid, whether in-kind gifts sit in the same total as cash, whether a donor who gave last in month thirteen is lapsed or merely late — each choice moves the headline figure. We settle those with your finance and development leads first and encode them in DAX measures (opens in new tab) that every report page reuses, so the definition lives in one place instead of in six versions of the same spreadsheet.
Deliverables for a typical engagement: the report files and semantic model in your own tenant, tested measures for grant and restricted-fund balances, donor retention and recurring giving, program delivery and cost per participant, workspace and row-level security configuration, a refresh schedule with monitoring notes, and written documentation. Timeline is typically 2–4 weeks from kickoff, stated in your scope before you commit, with 30 days of post-delivery hypercare included.
Nonprofit reporting is rarely a single-source problem, and the connection work is usually the honest majority of the effort. The table below shows the systems we most often join, what we take from each, and which reporting question it answers. During scoping we confirm what your systems really expose — a supported connector, an API, or a scheduled export — rather than assuming access we have not seen.
| Source system | What we typically pull | What it feeds |
|---|---|---|
| Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT | Constituents, gift transactions, appeals, campaigns and fund designations | Donor retention and lapsed-donor cohorts, appeal and campaign performance |
| Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) | Contacts and households, opportunities recorded as gifts, recurring donations, general accounting units | Donor lifecycle, recurring-giving attrition, pipeline and major-gift views |
| Dynamics 365 and Dataverse | Constituent, award and case or delivery records held in your Microsoft tenant | Grant lifecycle stages and program delivery against commitment |
| Accounting (Financial Edge NXT, Sage Intacct, QuickBooks) | Fund and grant codes, budget versus actual, restricted and unrestricted balances | Restricted-fund reporting, grant burn rate, program cost allocation |
| Program spreadsheets and Microsoft Forms | Service counts, attendance registers and outcome measures collected in the field | Program outcome pages and the delivery section of funder reports |
Microsoft runs its own grant and discount programs for eligible nonprofit organizations across Microsoft 365, Azure and Dynamics 365, with eligibility assessed and registration handled by Microsoft — the current offers and conditions are published on Microsoft’s nonprofit page (opens in new tab). We are an independent consultancy, not a reseller of those grants, so we will not quote you an offer, a discount percentage or an approval outcome. What we will do during scoping is look at what your tenant already carries and size reporting licences around it, which for most organizations is a question of how many people author reports versus how many merely view them. Our guide to which Power BI licences a small organization actually needs walks through that trade-off, and what a Power BI dashboard build really costs covers the factors that move a fixed fee up or down.
It fits small and mid-sized nonprofits — roughly the size where one person owns both the funder report and the board deck. A development director who can see total raised but not who lapsed. A finance lead rebuilding a restricted-fund schedule by hand every quarter because the CRM and the ledger disagree. A program manager asked to evidence outcomes for a renewal with three weeks’ notice. An executive director who wants the board pack to be a link rather than a fortnight of assembly. If your data is accurate but arrives too late and too manually to influence anything, that is the gap this closes.
This page is the nonprofit-shaped version of our wider fixed-fee Power BI dashboard development service, so nothing here is a different engineering standard — only a different vocabulary, in the same way our OEE and downtime dashboards for manufacturers speak reason codes and cycle times instead of grants and cohorts. The underlying work — connect the sources, agree the measures, deploy under governance — is the same on both.
Three common shapes cover most nonprofit requests. Every fee is fixed and put in writing after your free consultation — the table shows scope and typical timeline, not prices, because an honest price requires seeing your sources first.
| Tier | Scope | Typical timeline | Fee |
|---|---|---|---|
| Grant and restricted-fund starter | One or two sources: spend-to-date and remaining balance per grant, burn rate against the award period, budget versus actual by fund, and refresh configured | About 2 weeks | Fixed fee — scoped after your free consultation |
| Donor retention and campaign pack | CRM joined to the ledger: retention and lapsed-donor cohorts, recurring-giving attrition, appeal and campaign performance, average gift trends, and development-team views | 2–3 weeks | Fixed fee — scoped after your free consultation |
| Board and funder reporting rollout | CRM, finance and program sources in one governed model: board pack pages, program outcome reporting, row-level security by program or region, and admin documentation | 3–4 weeks | Fixed fee — scoped after your free consultation |
Whatever the tier, you own every artifact — report files, semantic model, measure definitions and workspace settings live in your Microsoft tenant from the first day.
Related services
The wider fixed-fee dashboard service: semantic models, DAX, governed reporting and Fabric migration for any sector.
Intake, case and volunteer apps that replace the paper forms and spreadsheets feeding your program reporting.
Grant approvals, expense routing and reminders when a fund balance or report deadline needs someone’s attention.
An honest fixed-fee cost breakdown and the factors that move the number on a Power BI build.
Which licences a smaller organization really needs when most people only view reports.
The questions to ask before you hand anyone your donor, grant and financial data.
FAQ
Every build includes discovery with your development, program and finance leads, connections to your CRM, accounting system and grant trackers, a semantic model, validated restricted-fund, donor and program measures, role-based report pages, governed workspace deployment, and written documentation. The scope and the fee are agreed in writing before any work starts.
Yes — that is usually the first thing we model. Grants, restricted and unrestricted funds are separated in the semantic model, so spend-to-date, remaining balance and burn rate are shown per grant and per period, with drill-through to the transactions behind any figure your finance lead questions.
All three are common, alongside the accounting system and the spreadsheets in between. We connect through supported exports or APIs, agreed during scoping rather than assumed. Where a source cannot be reached directly, we design a reliable export path and document it so refreshes do not depend on one person.
Microsoft publishes its own grant and discount programs for eligible nonprofit organizations, and eligibility is determined by Microsoft, not by us. We will not promise a specific offer or price. During scoping we check what your tenant already has and size the licensing around it, then point you to Microsoft's published terms.
Typical delivery is two to four weeks from kickoff. A single donor or grant dashboard from one clean source lands at the short end; a board pack spanning CRM, finance and program data with row-level security sits at the longer end. Your written scope states the delivery date before you commit.
You do. The report files, semantic model, measure definitions, workspace settings and refresh configuration live in your own Microsoft tenant from the first day, and the documentation is written so your team or a future consultant can maintain them. There is no proprietary layer and no ongoing license to us.
Book a free consultation
Tell us what you’re trying to fix — a report, an approval process, an intranet, a Copilot rollout. We scope it as a fixed-fee project, you approve, and a senior engineer delivers in 2–4 weeks.
The fastest way to reach us is the form — tell us the task and we’ll reply within one business day.