Project profitability, visible per partner — and only per partner.
Partners at a 45-person professional services firm couldn't see which projects made money until the quarterly close — and the finance team refused to circulate the full margin workbook, because every partner would see everyone else's numbers. This is how one Power BI dashboard with row-level security gave each partner their own margin view without exposing anyone else's.
The margin workbook everyone needed — and nobody could see.
Profitability at the firm surfaced exactly once a quarter, at the close. Until then, partners ran their engagements blind: scope crept, discounts were granted, write-offs accumulated — and whether any of it had eaten the margin only became clear long after the decisions that caused it. A partner pricing the next engagement had no reliable way of knowing whether the last one, for the same client, had actually made money.
The strange part was that the answer existed. Finance held a margin workbook that pulled together timesheets, billing and project budgets — a complete picture of which projects earned and which bled. But the workbook had one fatal property: it was all-or-nothing. Open it, and you saw every partner's portfolio, every client's rates, every colleague's write-offs. Partner margins are among the most sensitive numbers in a professional services firm, so finance made the only defensible call available to them — the workbook stayed locked.
That left the firm in a stalemate. The people making pricing and staffing decisions couldn't see the data those decisions depended on, and the people holding the data couldn't share it without oversharing it. Quarterly close conversations turned into archaeology — examining margins on work too old to fix — while the finance team fielded one-off "how is my project doing" requests it could only answer by hand. The problem was never the numbers. It was that one file had to serve every audience or none.
One model, one dashboard — and security does the splitting.
Instead of producing a redacted workbook per partner, we built the picture once and let the security model decide who sees which slice of it.
A profitability model joining timesheets, billing and project budgets — the same inputs behind the locked workbook, now combined in one governed Power BI dataset instead of a spreadsheet.
Margin by project, by client and by partner on one screen — so a partner can see how an engagement is tracking against its budget while there is still time to act on it, not a quarter later.
Each partner opens the same dashboard and sees only their own portfolio. The filtering happens in the model itself — there is no unredacted copy floating around to leak, forward or screenshot.
The same security model grants managing partners the firm-wide view — every project, every client, every partner — from the identical dashboard. One build serves both audiences; nobody maintains two reports.
The stalemate, dissolved.
Three numbers tell the before-and-after: how long partners wait to see margin, how many dashboards it takes to serve every audience, and how much of the margin data stays exactly where it belongs.
The service behind this build — and two more Power BI stories.
Numbers your leadership can't see until it's too late?
Book a free 30-minute audit — we'll look at where your margin data lives today and show you what a secured, per-person dashboard would take to build.