We configure it to your business, not start from scratch.
The difference isn't how fast we work. It's where we start.
Everyone else · starts here
First trusted reporting: month 8
Six roles, billed by the day, producing what a product already contains.
Fabric Accelerator · starts here
First trusted reporting: week 4
The first version already got thrown away. Just not on your budget.
A project is bought before it exists. You fund the design, the build and the corrections, and you find out what you bought at the end. A product is the opposite. It exists, it has already been through all of that, and the only question left is how it fits you.
The medallion structure, the ingestion framework, the PII masking, the slowly changing dimensions: all of it is built and proven. Connecting your sources is a configuration exercise. There is no first version to throw away, because the rework happened long before you arrived, on somebody else's timeline.
Adding a new source is a configuration change, not a development project. No bespoke code to reverse-engineer, no undocumented logic living in one person's head. Because it's a framework, it can be documented and taught, so the platform stops being a single point of failure the day it goes live.
Whatever you want your data to do in three years, it will be standing on the same thing: a layer where the numbers are right and everyone can see why. Get that wrong and every later ambition inherits the problem. Get it right once and everything after it becomes cheaper.
Dashboards and Power BI that everyone agrees on
Copilot and Fabric AI answering from data you trust
Automation that acts on figures, not guesses
Your trusted data layer
New systems arrive as configuration rather than another project. Acquiring a business stops being a data crisis.
Definitions agreed once and applied everywhere, with every change logged and every load traceable.
The same platform runs on the smallest Fabric capacity and the largest. Growing changes a setting, not the design.
Personal data masked at the point of query, access through your existing Microsoft identity, all inside your tenant.
When someone challenges a number, you can answer it rather than go away and investigate.
This is the layer your reporting and your AI connect to.
Not the other way round.
Every layer below is prebuilt. Configuring it to your sources is what the four weeks are for.
Landed exactly as received, with full history retained. Nothing edited, so you can always prove where a number came from.
Cleaned, typed and joined. One customer record, one product list, one version of each entity across every system.
Modelled to how you actually report. Agreed definitions, so revenue means one thing in every dashboard.
New source added by configuration, not code. Same framework, same governance, no new build.
Copilot and Fabric's AI features are genuinely useful, but they inherit whatever they're given. Point them at four systems that disagree with each other and you get confident answers that happen to be wrong, produced faster than anyone can check them.
The gold layer is what makes the difference: agreed definitions, traceable lineage, one version of each figure. That isn't preparation for AI, it's the same thing that makes your Monday reporting trustworthy. More on how governance works →
The configuration interface, the health dashboard, the run history: all of it is running today. Open it in your browser and click around. No login, nothing to install.
Governance is in the architecture rather than bolted on later as a phase nobody budgeted for.
One interface for the whole platform, flagging refresh times that drift outside tolerance. You hear it from us, not from the FD on Monday.
A governed foundation is what makes Fabric's AI and reporting features worth switching on rather than a demo that impresses nobody.
Most businesses can answer the first one. Very few get past the third without a pause.
Not which report. Which system, which extract, which manual adjustment, and which spreadsheet somebody opens on the last Friday of the month to make the two halves agree.
Usually one person. Usually not their actual job. Usually something built in a fortnight three years ago to solve a problem, which four departments now quietly depend on.
If that person left on Friday, could anyone else explain how the numbers are produced? It was never a project, so nobody documented it. It was a favour that turned into infrastructure.
This is the one that matters. For most businesses the honest answer is that they don't know, and wouldn't find out until a customer, an auditor or the bank pointed it out.
If those answers were uncomfortable, the question isn't whether to fix it. It's what fixing it costs.
Both are legitimate routes and plenty of good businesses take them. Every figure below is built from published UK market rates, not from our estimate of what anyone charges. Sources are listed underneath each column.
Year one · before any output
Months one to three you're recruiting. Months three to four they're serving notice. Months four to six they're agreeing an approach. Months six to nine they're building the version you'll rebuild. The salary line then continues for as long as you own the platform, and holiday, sick cover and the first resignation are all still to come.
Salaries: IT Jobs Watch UK medians excl. London, 2026. Employer NI 15% above the £5,000 secondary threshold, pension 3% minimum: HMRC and The Pensions Regulator, 2026–27. Recruitment at 20% of base, mid-point of the 15–25% typical specialist permanent range.
26-week build · mid-market partner rates
A partner rate is not a salary. It carries delivery management, utilisation cover, bench time and margin, which is why it sits well above what the same person earns as a contractor. Nobody is full-time for six months, so roles are part-loaded. And because it's bespoke, every later change means going back to the people who built it.
Rates reflect published 2026 UK mid-market consulting benchmarks: specialist firms bill roughly £700–£1,200 a day for mid-level consultants and more for principals and architects. Regional partners sit at the lower end, London at the upper. Loading assumptions shown. Excludes VAT and change control.
9–12 months · one pair of hands
The cheapest-looking route on paper, and the one that most often stalls. One person designs, builds, tests and documents alone, with nobody to review the decisions and nobody to cover illness or a better offer. Everything they know is undocumented until the day they hand over, and handovers are where bespoke platforms go to die.
£750/day sits below the 2026 IT Jobs Watch medians for Enterprise Data Architect (£763) and Head of Data Architecture (£775). Agency margin at 30% is typical for contractor placement. 220 billable days allows for holiday and gaps. Excludes VAT.
£0 ———————— £285,000 ———————— £570,000
| Fabric Accelerator | One contractor | Another partner | Build a team | Global integrator | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starting point | A working platform | A blank page | A blank page | An empty org chart | A blank page |
| Time to trusted data | 4 weeks | 9–12 months | 6–9 months | 9–12 months | 6–12 months |
| Indicative cost | From £20,000, fixed | circa £214,500 | circa £293,000 | £262,775, year one | circa £570,000 |
| Ongoing | From £1,000 a month | Rate continues, or they go | Day rate per change | £224,475+ a year in salary | Day rate per change |
| Who maintains it | Your team or us, your choice | Nobody, once they leave | Usually the partner | The person who built it | Usually the integrator |
| Risk if it stalls | Four weeks and a known number | One person, no cover | Sunk cost, months in | Salaries continue regardless | Sunk cost, months in |
Deployment
£20,000*
Starting price · typically live in 4 weeks
*Final price depends on the number and type of source systems. We tell you the figure before you commit, not after discovery.
Managed service
From £1,000
Per month · four tiers
Full tier detail below. The platform is built so your own team can run it, so the service level you take is a choice about capacity, not a dependency.
Continuous improvement days are the important line. They're not support hours held in reserve for when something breaks: they're days spent moving the platform forward, on whatever you decide matters that month.
Essentials
Platform running, your team driving.
£1,000
per month
Accelerate
Platform managed, team supported.
£3,000
per month
Elevate
Platform managed, business advanced.
£5,000
per month
Enterprise
Scoped around what you actually need.
Custom
scoped and priced
None of these change what you get. The first two reduce the fee on their own, and because they stack, taking both gives you the third.
5%
Pay 12 months up front
Settle the annual managed service fee in advance and take 5% off it. No tie-in beyond the year you've paid for.
5%
Consolidate your Fabric licensing
Move your Microsoft Fabric capacity licensing to MPowerUp and take a further 5% off, for qualifying customers. One supplier, one invoice, one place to ask.
10%
Both together
The two combine. On Elevate that's £6,000 off the year. On Accelerate, £3,600.
| Annual managed service | Standard | Either discount | Both |
|---|---|---|---|
| Essentials · £1,000/mo | £12,000 | £11,400 | £10,800 |
| Accelerate · £3,000/mo | £36,000 | £34,200 | £32,400 |
| Elevate · £5,000/mo | £60,000 | £57,000 | £54,000 |
Discounts apply to the managed service fee only, not to deployment or additional day rates. All figures exclude VAT. Fabric licensing consolidation is subject to qualification.
Tell us what you're running now and we'll answer that honestly. If it isn't a fit, we'll say so on the call rather than three weeks into a discovery phase.
A client partner first.
Microsoft partner second.