Why we replaced Power BI with Metabase, and what we learned on launch day
A law firm's reports kept stopping without warning, and nobody knew whether the numbers on screen were from today or last week. This is how we fixed it, and how the first day nearly went wrong.
Too many steps
For a figure to reach a report, it had to pass through four places:
- The software the firm uses to manage its cases.
- A database holding a copy.
- A Google spreadsheet.
- Power BI, the tool that drew the charts.
Every step could fail, and the third often did: the Google connection expired every few days. When it did, the reports froze and nobody noticed. Adding a new question also meant changing all four steps.
We removed two steps
We set up Metabase, a free program for building chart dashboards, reading straight from the database. The path came down to three points: the firm's software, the database and the charts.
It runs on a server the firm was already paying for, so there was no new subscription. Metabase can read the data but cannot change or delete it. And the old system was switched off but kept, so going back took half an hour.
Day one went wrong
We had tested everything with our administrator account, which can see everything. When the first member of the team logged in, every chart showed the same message: "you don't have permission to see this".
Picture being given the key to a room where every painting on the wall has its own lock. The team could open the dashboards but not the data behind each chart. We gave them read-only access to that data and fixed it the same day.
There were a couple of smaller stumbles too, and we would have seen none of them without testing as a real user.
The result
The team now has six dashboards that stay up to date, with filters to search on their own. Clicking a number shows the cases behind it, without asking anyone.
With the data finally in view, a long-standing problem showed up: the count of open cases was inflated by almost 63%, because the system created a case for every first consultation, even when nobody went on to hire the firm. We flagged those so they don't count, and deleted nothing.
Three ideas for any business
- Every time data is copied from one place to another, something can break. Removing a step often helps more than buying another tool.
- Test things the way your team will use them. If only you test them, with access to everything, you won't see the problems they will.
- The first numbers will look odd. It's usually the first time anyone has looked at them closely.
Do your reports depend on copying data by hand or on connections that keep dropping? Tell us about it.