The challenge
A multi-store retailer was running sales reporting out of five disconnected places: the e-commerce platform, the in-store POS system, a CRM, and two sets of spreadsheets the regional managers kept by hand. Every Monday someone spent half a day exporting and pasting it all into one file — which was out of date by the time it was finished.
Leadership couldn't answer simple questions quickly: how did online compare to stores last week? Which products were actually growing? Nobody fully trusted the weekly file.
The approach
- Mapped the questions first — the five things leadership genuinely needed to see each morning.
- Connected every source into one pipeline so nothing had to be exported by hand again.
- Modelled the data as a clean star schema (sales facts around date, product, store and channel dimensions).
- Built one report with a five-second summary on top and drill-down into product, region and channel underneath.
What I built
A single Power BI dashboard with KPI cards for revenue, growth and target attainment, a trend line comparing online versus in-store, a ranked view of top and bottom products, and a detail table for the questions that always come up in the room. It refreshes automatically every morning before the team arrives.
The half-day Monday report disappeared entirely. The same view is now live, accurate and self-updating — and the regional managers stopped keeping their own spreadsheets because they finally trust the central one.
The outcome
Five sources became one source of truth, manual reporting work dropped by around 90%, and leadership got a daily picture they actually rely on for decisions about stock, promotions and underperforming lines.