Managed BI for South African SMBs

All your business systems. Now they read like one.

We connect your existing business tools — Xero, Shopify, POS, inventory — into a single live dashboard. Built, maintained, and monitored for you. Just log in when you need answers.

Built for established SA businesses running Xero, Shopify, Sage, or similar cloud platforms.

Book a free discovery call 3-month minimum, then month-to-month. No lock-in.
Built on Microsoft Azure · Hosted in South Africa North (Johannesburg) · POPIA-compliant · BBBEE Level 4 Contributor
The problem

You run your business on 3–6 different systems, and none of them talk to each other.

You can't see your margin by product. You don't know which customers are slipping away. Pulling together a monthly picture takes hours of spreadsheet work. The tools to fix this exist — but they require an expensive data team to run them.

By the numbers
3–6 Disconnected systems the average SA SMB runs, with no unified view
4 hrs Typical time lost monthly manually reconciling data across platforms
4 wks From discovery call to live, automated dashboard — no technical work from you
Daily Refreshed every night. Ready with your morning coffee.

What you get

All your systems. One view.

We pull Xero, Shopify, your POS, and other platforms into a single live dashboard. No more switching between tools, no more month-end spreadsheet marathons — everything in one place, every morning.

See what was invisible before.

Margin by product. Customers quietly slipping away. Which channel is actually driving profit. The answers are already in your data — they just live across three different systems right now.

We run it. You read it.

We build your dashboard, monitor every pipeline, and fix issues before you notice. As your business changes, we evolve the dashboards with it. Your job is to make decisions — not manage infrastructure.

Less than a part-time hire.

One flat monthly fee for your whole organisation. No setup surprises. No lock-in.

Starter
R2,500/mo
+ R5,000 once-off onboarding
  • Up to 2 data sources
  • Up to 5 dashboard pages
  • Daily data refresh
  • Email response within 48 hours
Our pick
Growth
R4,000/mo
+ R8,000 once-off onboarding
  • Up to 5 data sources
  • Up to 12 dashboard pages
  • Daily data refresh
  • Read-only SQL database access
  • 1 ad hoc report per quarter
  • Bi-annual data model review
  • Email response within 24 hours
Scale
R7,000/mo
+ R14,000 once-off onboarding
  • Up to 10 data sources
  • Up to 20 dashboard pages
  • Daily data refresh
  • Read-only SQL database access
  • 2 ad hoc reports per quarter
  • Quarterly data model review
  • Email + Teams response within 4 hours

3-month minimum term, then month-to-month with 30 days' notice. Your data is always yours — full export on cancellation.

Systems we connect

If your business runs on it, chances are we connect to it.

Xero Sage Business Cloud QuickBooks Shopify WooCommerce Lightspeed POS Yoco PayFast Stripe HubSpot Salesforce PaySpace Cin7 Google Ads Meta Ads Excel / CSV + more

On Pastel or another desktop system? See our FAQ — there are practical workarounds for most setups.

How it works

Clarity, delivered with your morning coffee.

1

Week 1 — Discovery

We audit your systems and understand the questions you need answered. You tell us what matters; we figure out how to measure it.

2

Weeks 2–3 — Build

We connect your data sources, build automated pipelines, and create your dashboards. You don't touch a thing.

3

Week 4 — Go live

You log in, your data is there, every morning. We handle everything from here — monitoring, maintenance, and improvements over time.

Background

Roost & Co. is a specialty coffee roaster based in Woodstock, Cape Town. Founded in 2019, they roast small batches for a growing list of wholesale cafés across the Western Cape, sell single-origin beans direct to consumers through their online store, and run a flagship roastery café where most weekend revenue comes from card payments.

Annual revenue sits around R14 million, split roughly across wholesale, direct online sales, and the roastery café. The team is small: a head roaster, two baristas, a part-time bookkeeper, and the founder who handles everything else — including pulling numbers together at month-end.

Their stack

Three systems, none of them talking

Xero
Accounting, invoicing, supplier costs
Shopify
Online store and subscriptions
Yoco
In-store card payments at the café
The problem

What the founder couldn't see

  • No way to view total revenue across all three channels in one place — month-end took a full Saturday of spreadsheet work.
  • No visibility into the café's trading pattern — whether weekends were driving the majority of revenue, and what that meant for staffing and stock ordering.
  • Product margin was invisible — some top-selling beans had very different cost structures that eroded their contribution, but this was impossible to see across separate systems.
  • Online repeat-purchase behaviour lived in Shopify; the founder had no view of how it compared to the cafe's repeat customers.
  • Inventory decisions on raw beans were made by gut feel — there was no link between roasting volumes, supplier costs, and downstream sales velocity.
What we built

One Power BI dashboard, six pages, refreshed daily

We connected Xero, Shopify, and Yoco into a private Azure environment, modelled the data so wholesale, online, and café revenue could be viewed together, and built a Power BI dashboard with pages for sales overview, customer analysis, product performance, debtors, channel comparison, and data freshness. The whole build took three weeks from kickoff. Roost now logs in each morning to one place — no more month-end spreadsheet Saturday.

What the data revealed

Four insights from the first month

Revenue concentrated in a handful of customers
A handful of wholesale cafés were quietly carrying the business — invisible across three separate systems.
In-store revenue is heavily concentrated on weekends
The roastery café's takings skew strongly toward Fridays and weekends — directly shaping how Roost plans staffing, stock orders, and weekly cash flow.
Revenue rank and margin rank don't agree
The gap between the highest and lowest margin products is significant. Some top sellers by volume are far less profitable than they appear — only visible once costs and revenue are modelled together.
A strong online repeat-purchase rate — higher than expected
Higher than industry average — gave them confidence to launch a subscription product.
Live sample dashboard

Browse the report yourself

The actual Power BI report we built for Roost & Co. — fully interactive. Use the page tabs at the bottom to explore each view.

Want to explore it without the page constraints?
Open the report full screen in a new tab.
Open full screen →

Roost & Co. is a fictional client we built to demonstrate our approach. The systems, problems, and insights reflect realistic SA SMB scenarios.

Common questions

Yes. Your data lives in a private Azure environment in Johannesburg — never shared with other clients, never transferred outside South Africa. We connect via API read-access only and never write data back to your systems. Everything is encrypted at rest and in transit, with credentials stored in Azure Key Vault. You receive a full POPIA-compliant Data Processing Agreement with your service contract.
Pastel Partner and Pastel Xpress don't have a REST API, so fully automated pipelines aren't possible. We can work with scheduled CSV exports from Pastel, though this requires your team to drop files at a regular cadence. If you're on Xero, Sage Business Cloud, or considering a switch, the service is entirely automated with zero manual effort on your side — which is worth factoring in if you're evaluating a cloud accounting migration.
Power BI Pro is required to view dashboards in Power BI Service. It's included in Microsoft 365 Business Premium, E3, and E5 plans — many businesses already have it. If you don't, a Power BI Pro licence costs around R280 per user per month directly from Microsoft. We'll walk you through it during onboarding. You don't need any technical knowledge to use the dashboards once they're built.
Yes — and we encourage it. We add additional Power BI viewers at no extra cost from us (they'll need their own Power BI Pro licence, usually included in their Microsoft 365 plan). Many clients give their accountant or bookkeeper viewer access so they can pull live numbers during month-end without asking you. We see accountants as partners, not gatekeepers.
A freelancer builds it once and hands it over. Within weeks, the data goes stale because source systems update their APIs, pipelines break, and nobody's watching. DataSeam is a managed service — we monitor every pipeline daily, fix issues before you notice, and update your dashboards as your business evolves. Your data stays fresh because that's our job, not a favour.
Syft is a great tool for accounting reports — many of our prospects already use it through their accountant. The difference is scope. Syft answers questions about your finances by joining accounting and e-commerce data inside its own interface. DataSeam connects your finances and your operational systems — POS, inventory, payroll, marketing spend — into a Power BI dashboard you fully own. If you want product-level margin combining Shopify SKUs with Xero costs, or true wholesale customer profitability with delivery costs factored in, that's outside Syft's scope. The two can sit happily side by side.
Everything required to get you live: a discovery workshop, your own private Azure environment in Johannesburg, automated pipelines for each source system, the data model behind the dashboards, your initial dashboard pages, SQL database access, and a handover walkthrough. The retainer only kicks in once your first dashboard is delivered and accepted — you're not paying twice.
You receive a full export of everything — raw data and reporting layers — in CSV or SQL format within 14 days of cancellation. After 30 days, all your data is permanently deleted from our Azure environment and you receive written confirmation. Your data is always yours.
There's a 3-month minimum term. This covers onboarding, the build phase, and your first month of live operation — enough time to properly evaluate what the service does. After that, it's month-to-month with 30 days' notice to cancel. The onboarding fee is non-refundable once work has commenced, which protects both parties' time.

Let's see what your data is hiding.

Book a free 15-minute discovery call. No commitment. No pitch. Just an honest look at whether this fits.

Book a discovery call zach@dataseam.co.za