Managed BI for South African SMBs

Your business runs on six systems. Now it reads 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 SA businesses on Xero, Shopify, or Sage with R5M+ revenue.

Book a free discovery call 3-month minimum, then month-to-month. No lock-in.

Acme Retail Analytics — Sales Overview

Key metrics — April 2026

Revenue MTD

R284k

↑ 12% vs last mo.

Gross Margin

41.2%

↑ 2.1pp

Debtors 30+

R18k

↑ R4k

Monthly revenue

Oct

Nov

Dec

Jan

Feb

Mar

Apr

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

Know your numbers every morning

Revenue, margin, debtors, product performance, stock — waiting for you before you check your phone. Updated automatically, every night.

Data that updates itself

Your data flows from every connected system into one place automatically. No spreadsheets, no stale numbers — just one live view.

We run the plumbing. You run the business.

We monitor your pipelines, fix issues before you notice, and evolve your dashboards as your business grows. Your job is to read the numbers — not manage the plumbing.

Less than a part-time hire.

Monthly retainer. No setup surprises. No lock-in.

Starter

R2,500/mo

excl. VAT

+ R5,000 once-off onboarding (excl. VAT)

Up to 2 data sources
Up to 5 dashboard pages
Daily data refresh
48hr email support

Our pick
Growth
R4,000/mo
excl. VAT
+ R8,000 once-off onboarding (excl. VAT)
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
24hr email support

Scale

R7,000/mo

excl. VAT

+ R14,000 once-off onboarding (excl. VAT)

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
4hr email + Teams support

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

How it works

Clarity, delivered with your morning coffee.

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.

Weeks 2–3 — Build

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

Week 4 — Go live

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

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.

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.

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.