From Spreadsheets to a Power BI Reporting Hub Across Four Aviation Business Lines

At a glance

A private aviation company running ground operations, a flight school, charter sales, and regulatory reporting tracked each business in its own system and its own spreadsheets. Leadership had no common view of performance, and every report depended on someone exporting and reformatting data by hand. We built a Power BI reporting hub that pulls directly from the company's operational systems, refreshes throughout the day, and gives each business line the comparisons it actually manages to.

Challenges

• Disconnected systemsGround operations, scheduling, charter sales, and maintenance each ran on a different vendor platform, with no shared reporting layer.
• Spreadsheet dependencyWeekly sales and operations dashboards lived in Excel and had to be rebuilt from manual exports every cycle.
• Locked-down vendor dataSeveral platforms offered only APIs or restricted database access, so off-the-shelf connectors did not work.
• No consistent comparisonsLeaders wanted month-to-date, year-over-year, and rolling 12-month views, but each report calculated periods differently.

Solution

We worked as the company's embedded reporting team, meeting weekly with its operations analyst and systems administrator to prioritize and ship reports one business line at a time:

• Built custom Power Query connectors to vendor APIs, with automatic paging so every record loads, not just the first batch
• Published an all-locations operations report first, then extended the model to the flight school, charter sales, and FAA flight reporting
• Created a shared date model and a single comparison selector: MTD vs. prior MTD, MTD vs. prior year, YTD vs. prior YTD, and rolling 12 vs. prior rolling 12
• Scheduled refreshes every three hours within licensing limits, with a path to 30-minute refreshes on Premium capacity
• Mapped a data warehouse roadmap for systems that do not allow direct reporting access, ranking vendor exports and SDKs ahead of VPN pulls and automation fallbacks

Benefits

1. One source of truthEvery business line now reads from the same Power BI environment and the same definitions, so leadership compares locations and divisions on equal terms.
2. Current numbers, all dayReports refresh automatically eight times a day. Nobody waits on a weekly export to see how the business is performing.
3. A team that owns its reportingBecause we built in the open and shared every query, the client's own analyst diagnosed and fixed a measure in a live report without outside help, and its systems administrator reused our API pattern on a new internal project.
4. Room to growAdding a new data source is now a matter of adding a query to an existing model. When the business asked for flight-level data, the new API feed was delivered within two days.