You already have the data. It’s trapped in spreadsheets.

Nare Solutions builds Power BI dashboards for South African SMEs — so the answer to “how did we actually do last month?” takes four seconds instead of four days.

Book a consultation See a dashboard

Johannesburg · serving all of South Africa Builds from R24,500

Monthly sales dashboard

Shaun Nare’s work has been covered by Sowetan Radio 2000 702 2nd runner-up, Radio 2000 Level Up with 2000

Most South African SMEs are not short of data. They’re short of a view of it.

Roughly 30% of SMEs use any form of analytics at all. The other 70% are making six- and seven-figure decisions off a spreadsheet that one person maintains by hand.

The month-end scramble

Someone spends three days every month exporting, pasting and reconciling before anyone can see a number. By the time the report lands, the month it describes is already gone and there is nothing left to do about it.

Numbers that disagree

Sales quotes one revenue figure, finance quotes another, and the meeting is spent arguing about whose spreadsheet is right rather than what to do next. A single properly built data model ends that argument permanently.

Problems found too late

A margin slipping on one product line, a branch quietly underperforming, a customer stretching payment terms. All visible in the data months before anyone notices in the bank balance.

Key-person risk

The reporting lives in one analyst’s head and one laptop’s file structure. When they resign, the business loses its ability to see itself. Documented models and scheduled refreshes fix that.

What Nare Solutions does

Primary service

Power BI dashboards

Custom dashboards built on your actual data, not a template with your logo on it.

Connections to Excel, CSV, SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Xero, Sage, Google Sheets and most REST APIs
A proper semantic model underneath — relationships, DAX measures, date tables — so new questions don’t need a new build
Scheduled refreshes, so the dashboard is current when you open it
Row-level security where different people should see different slices
Designed to be read on a phone in a car park, not only on a 27-inch monitor

Primary service

Business solutions

The thinking that has to happen before a chart is worth building.

KPI design — deciding which ten numbers actually run your business, and defining each one precisely
Data modelling and cleanup of messy source systems
Automating recurring reports that currently eat days of someone’s month
Monthly written commentary on what the numbers moved and why
Training your team so they can answer their own questions

Add-on service

Web development

A professional site for businesses whose online presence undersells them.

Fast, mobile-first, built to load on a patchy mobile connection
SEO groundwork, Google Business Profile and structured data
Enquiry forms and click-to-WhatsApp, because that is how South Africans actually make contact
Priced as an add-on to a dashboard engagement, not as a separate agency relationship

Full service detail

How an engagement runs

Four stages. You can stop after the first one and keep everything it produced.

Data health check

A week of digging through what you already have. You get a written findings note, a proposed KPI set and a fixed quote. R4,500, credited in full against a build.

Model and build

Connections, data model, measures, then the dashboard itself. You see a working draft early rather than a big reveal at the end.

Review and hand over

Revision rounds against the agreed scope, a walkthrough with the people who will use it, and documentation you own.

Keep it alive

A monthly retainer covers refresh monitoring, fixes, small additions and commentary. Cancel on 30 days’ notice.

What it costs

Published, so you can work out whether this is worth a conversation before you have one. All prices in rand, excluding VAT.

Summary of Nare Solutions pricing tiers
Engagement	Build fee	Monthly	Best for
Data health check	R4,500	—	Finding out what is actually possible with your data
Foundation	R24,500	R3,500	One dashboard, one source. Sole traders and micro-SMEs
Business Intelligence Suite	R42,000	R7,500	Up to three dashboards, multiple sources. 5–50 staff
Data Partnership	from R85,000	from R15,000	Multi-branch, franchise and integration-heavy businesses

Comparable SA specialists quote R40,000 to R120,000 for a single production dashboard, and R160,000 upward for a departmental build.

Full rate card Book a consultation

Services

Three things, in order of what most clients need first. The dashboards are the visible part; the data work underneath is what makes them trustworthy.

Power BI dashboards

Reporting people actually open

A dashboard fails when nobody trusts the numbers or nobody can find the one they need. Both are design problems, and both are avoidable.

Every build starts with the semantic model — the relationships, date table and DAX measures beneath the visuals. Get that right and a new question takes an afternoon. Get it wrong and every new question is a new project.

What a build includes

Source connection and refresh scheduling
Data model: relationships, hierarchies, a proper date table
DAX measures for your KPIs, defined and documented
Report pages designed for both desktop and mobile layouts
Drill-through from summary to transaction detail
Row-level security where required
Publishing to your Power BI workspace and app
A walkthrough session and written documentation you keep

Sources commonly connected

Excel
CSV
SQL Server
MySQL
PostgreSQL
Google Sheets
Xero
Sage
SharePoint
REST APIs

Business solutions

Deciding what to measure

Most businesses ask for “a sales dashboard” and mean “I want to know whether we are going to make budget, and what to do if we aren’t.” Those are different briefs, and only one of them is useful.

This is the consulting half of the work: narrowing a long wish list down to the handful of numbers that change what you do on a Monday morning.

Typical work

KPI framework design — an agreed set of measures with owners and targets
Data model architecture across systems that were never meant to talk to each other
Cleaning and standardising source data before it reaches a report
Automating the manual monthly pack, so it builds itself
Monthly insights commentary: what moved, by how much, and the likely cause
Team training in Power BI, so questions stop routing through a consultant

Web development — add-on

A site that matches the business

Offered alongside a dashboard engagement rather than as a standalone service. Plenty of South African agencies build websites; far fewer can build the dashboard and the site as one engagement with one point of contact.

What you get

Custom design, not a purchased theme with the colours swapped
Mobile-first, built to load quickly on mobile data
Enquiry form with email notification, plus click-to-WhatsApp
On-page SEO, meta and Open Graph tags, LocalBusiness structured data
Google Business Profile setup and Google Analytics
Hosting and domain in your name, with the credentials handed to you

R9,500 for three pages alongside Foundation. R16,500 for five pages alongside the BI Suite. Included in a Data Partnership.

What is not included

Worth stating plainly, because unspoken exclusions are how consulting relationships sour.

Microsoft licensing

Power BI Pro runs at roughly $14 per user per month billed annually, paid by you directly to Microsoft. Anyone publishing or viewing content in a shared workspace needs one, and it is often already bundled into a Microsoft 365 E5 subscription. You will know what you need before you buy anything.

Heavy data remediation

Normal tidying is in scope. Rebuilding years of inconsistent records, deduplicating a customer master or reconstructing missing history is separate work, quoted after the health check. The health check exists so this surfaces before you sign, not after.

Scope beyond the agreed brief

Extra dashboards, new source systems or revision rounds past the agreed number are billed at R950 per hour or R6,500 per day. Nothing is billed without written agreement first.

Third-party costs

Domains, hosting, SSL certificates, paid connectors and API subscriptions stay in your name. They get set up for you and the credentials are handed over rather than held.

Dashboards

Three builds showing the reporting patterns most often asked for by South African SMEs — in retail, logistics and professional services.

These are demonstration builds on representative data, not client work. Nare Solutions launched in 2026; client dashboards will replace them here as engagements complete, with permission and anonymised where needed. Delivered work is at the bottom of this page.

Retail: stock and margin control

Built for the multi-branch retailer pattern, where the point-of-sale system reports sales well and says nothing useful about cash tied up in stock that is not moving.

The heatmap is deliberately the largest element on the page. Blended margin at group level tells you almost nothing. Margin by category and branch tells you exactly which manager to phone.

SourcesPOS export, stock file, supplier pricing

RefreshDaily, 05:30

Pages4, drill-through to SKU

TierBI Suite

Build time5 weeks

Logistics: fleet and delivery performance

An on-time percentage on its own gives an operations manager nowhere to go. Splitting late deliveries by cause — loading, transit, recipient, breakdown — and then by depot turns a score into a decision.

Cost per kilometre is tracked against the diesel price, so a rising figure separates cleanly into “fuel went up” and “something is wrong with how we are running”.

SourcesTelematics API, fuel cards, delivery notes

RefreshHourly

Pages5, including a driver scorecard

TierData Partnership

Build time8 weeks

Professional services: utilisation and recovery

Firms watch utilisation and ignore realisation, which is where the money actually leaks. Hours that get worked, recorded, and then written off at invoicing look like productivity right up until the bank statement.

Pairing the two per fee earner makes the pattern visible within a month, rather than at year end.

SourcesPractice management, timesheets, Xero

RefreshNightly

Pages3, row-level security by partner

TierBI Suite

Build time4 weeks

Delivered work: WalletHero

Python
Flask
PostgreSQL
Scheduled collection
HTML / CSS / JS

Products tracked108,000+

SectorSA grocery retail

Recognition2nd runner-up, Level Up with 2000

MediaSowetan, Radio 2000, 702

WalletHero is a South African grocery price comparison platform built by Shaun Nare. It tracks more than 108,000 products across retailers and shows shoppers where a basket costs least.

It is not client work, but it is the most honest evidence available of what this practice can do end to end: designing a data pipeline, keeping it running unattended at volume, modelling the output so it can be queried quickly, and putting a usable interface on top. Most SME dashboard work is a smaller version of that same problem.

The platform has been covered in the Sowetan, profiled on Radio 2000 and 702, and placed second runner-up in Radio 2000’s Level Up with 2000 competition.

Discuss a build

Rate card

Published in full, so you can decide whether this fits your budget before spending an hour on a call. All figures in South African rand. VAT is not currently charged; if that changes you will be told before it appears on an invoice.

Founding client offer, until 30 November 2026. The first three clients to sign get roughly 30% off the build fee and a reduced retainer for the first twelve months. You get the full service; Nare Solutions gets a reference and a case study. Rates are shown in the table further down.

Start with a health check

Nobody should commit R40,000 to a dashboard before anyone has looked at the data it will be built on.

R4,500

Data health check

One week, fixed fee

A working session on what decisions you need to make
A review of your actual source systems and data quality
A proposed KPI set with definitions
A written findings note and a fixed quote for the build

Credited in full against any build started within 30 days.

Most failed BI projects fail for reasons that were visible in week one: source data that cannot support the question being asked, two systems whose customer records do not reconcile, or a KPI nobody can define consistently.

The health check surfaces that before money is committed. You end up with a document that is useful whether or not you go ahead — it is yours either way, and you are free to take it to another consultancy.

If you do go ahead within 30 days, the R4,500 comes off the build fee, so the diagnostic effectively costs nothing.

Book a health check

Build tiers

Foundation

Sole traders, micro-SMEs, and businesses proving the idea before committing further.

R24,500

build fee · 2 to 3 weeks

then R3,500 per month
includes 4 hours of work

One Power BI dashboard, up to 4 pages
One data source
Monthly scheduled refresh
One revision round
Email support, 2 business day response
Handover session and documentation

Enquire

Most chosen

Business Intelligence Suite

Growing SMEs with 5 to 50 staff, several systems, and a management team that meets on numbers.

R42,000

build fee · 4 to 6 weeks

then R7,500 per month
includes 10 hours of work

Up to three dashboards
Multiple data sources, combined into one model
Weekly scheduled refresh
Two revision rounds
KPI strategy session before the build
Monthly written insights report
Priority support, same business day
Team training session

Enquire

Data Partnership

Established SMEs, franchise groups and multi-branch operations with integration requirements.

from R85,000

build fee · 6 to 12 weeks

then from R15,000 per month
scoped to the retained hours agreed

Unlimited dashboards within agreed scope
API and custom system integrations
Near real-time refresh where the source allows
Row-level security and a governance framework
Quarterly strategy sessions
Ongoing team training
Website and e-commerce included
Named contact, agreed response times

Request a quote

Side by side

	Foundation	BI Suite	Data Partnership
Build fee	R24,500	R42,000	from R85,000
Monthly retainer	R3,500	R7,500	from R15,000
Retainer hours included	4	10	by agreement
Dashboards	1	Up to 3	Unlimited in scope
Data sources	1	Multiple	Multiple, incl. APIs
Refresh frequency	Monthly	Weekly	Daily to near real-time
Revision rounds	1	2	Ongoing in scope
KPI strategy session	—	Yes	Quarterly
Monthly insights report	—	Yes	Yes
Row-level security	—	If required	Yes, with governance
Team training	—	One session	Ongoing
Support response	2 business days	Same business day	Agreed SLA
Website add-on	+R9,500 (3 pages)	+R16,500 (5 pages)	Included
Delivery	2–3 weeks	4–6 weeks	6–12 weeks

Scroll the table sideways on a narrow screen.

Founding client rates

For the first three clients who sign before 30 November 2026. The reduced retainer holds for twelve months, then moves to the standard rate.

Tier	Standard build	Founding build	Standard monthly	Founding monthly
Foundation	R24,500	R17,500	R3,500	R2,900
BI Suite	R42,000	R29,500	R7,500	R5,500
Data Partnership	from R85,000	By negotiation	from R15,000	By negotiation

In exchange: a written reference, permission to publish an anonymised case study, and a reasonable willingness to take a reference call from a prospective client.

Claim a founding place

Add-ons and ad-hoc work

Item	Rate	Notes
Additional dashboard	from R9,500	On an existing data model, after the initial build
Additional data source	from R6,500	Depends on the system and whether an API exists
Three-page website	R9,500	With a Foundation engagement
Five-page website	R16,500	With a BI Suite engagement
E-commerce build	from R28,000	Payment gateway, product catalogue, order management
Website care plan	R950 / month	Hosting oversight, updates, backups, small content changes
Power BI training	R6,500 / half day	Up to 8 people, on your own data
Ad-hoc consulting	R950 / hour	Work outside an agreed scope
Day rate	R6,500 / day	For longer pieces of out-of-scope work
Data remediation	Quoted	Deduplication, historical reconstruction, master data cleanup

Terms and common questions

How payment works

50% of the build fee on signature, 50% on handover. Retainers are billed monthly in advance and can be cancelled on 30 days’ written notice. Payment terms are 14 days. There is no lock-in contract on any tier.

Why this is cheaper than the big consultancies

Because there is no sales team, no account manager layer, and no office. South African specialists quote R40,000 to R120,000 for a single production dashboard and R160,000 upward for a departmental build; those figures carry overhead this practice does not have. The work standard is the same. The invoice is not.

Why this is not the cheapest option

Freelance marketplaces will produce a dashboard for R2,000. What you usually get is a set of charts on top of a flat file, with no data model underneath, which breaks the first time the source changes shape and cannot answer a question it was not explicitly built for. Rebuilding that costs more than building it properly once.

Who owns what

You do. The Power BI files, the data model, the documentation and the website all belong to you and live in accounts registered in your name. If you stop working with Nare Solutions, everything stays with you and works without further involvement.

What if the scope changes

It usually does. Anything outside the agreed brief is quoted in writing at R950 per hour or R6,500 per day before work starts, so nothing arrives on an invoice as a surprise.

Do I have to take the retainer

No. You can commission a build and walk away with it. The retainer exists because a dashboard nobody maintains drifts out of date within a quarter and gets quietly abandoned — but that is your call to make, not a condition of the build.

Book a consultation

About

Nare Solutions is a Johannesburg data consultancy. It is deliberately small, and the person you speak to is the person who builds the work.

Shaun Nare

Founder & commercial analyst

Based in: Johannesburg
Core tools: Power BI, SQL, Python
Also builds: Web applications
Side project: WalletHero

Message on WhatsApp

Shaun Nare is a commercial analyst by profession. The day job is the unglamorous version of this work: taking data that was never designed to be analysed, building something reliable on top of it, and then explaining to people who do not think in spreadsheets what it means and what they should do about it.

Nare Solutions exists because that capability rarely reaches the businesses that would benefit most from it. Large corporates have analysts. Enterprise consultancies will build for you at R160,000 and up. South African SMEs — which make up 91% of formal businesses, around a third of GDP and 60% of employment — mostly sit between those two options with a spreadsheet and a suspicion that they are missing something.

Roughly 30% of SMEs use analytics in any form. That gap is the entire reason this practice was started.

WalletHero

Outside client work, Shaun built and runs WalletHero, a South African grocery price comparison platform tracking over 108,000 products. It placed second runner-up in Radio 2000’s Level Up with 2000 competition, and has been covered in the Sowetan and profiled on Radio 2000 and 702.

It matters here for one reason: it is a working system that collects, cleans and models data at volume, unattended, and has been doing so long enough to prove it holds together. That is the same discipline an SME dashboard needs, at a larger scale.

Technical background

Power BI
DAX
SQL
Python
Excel
Tableau
Power Query
Flask
PostgreSQL
HTML / CSS / JS

How the work runs

You deal with one person, from first call to handover, and afterwards
Prices are published rather than discovered at proposal stage
You own every file, account and credential produced
If your problem does not need a dashboard, you will be told that
No lock-in. Retainers cancel on 30 days’ notice

The market this is built for

Figures from the Absa SME Growth Index, SEDA and the FNB SME Index.

2.67 million

Small, medium and micro enterprises operating in South Africa.

91%

Of formal businesses in the country are SMEs, contributing around 34% of GDP and 60% of employment.

About 30%

Of South African SMEs use any form of data analytics. The rest are running on instinct and month-old spreadsheets.

Start a conversation

A first call takes about fifteen minutes. Bring a rough idea of what you wish you could see and which systems your data sits in — that is enough to work out whether this is worth going further.

Send an enquiry

Fill this in and it opens WhatsApp with your details ready to send, which is the quickest way to get a reply.

Direct contact

WhatsApp: 060 544 2741Usually the fastest route
Phone: 060 544 2741+27 60 544 2741 from abroad
Email: shaun@naresolutions.co.za
Location: JohannesburgRemote countrywide; on-site in Gauteng
Hours: Mon–Fri, 08:00–17:00South African Standard Time

Booking link goes here. Replace this block with a Cal.com or Calendly embed once the account is set up, so prospects can put a slot in the diary without waiting for a reply.