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When companies decide to adopt the use of Power BI, they have a major choice to make, either from an in-house team or collaborate with specialized consultants.
Although in-house knowledge is attractive, it can be expensive, time-consuming, and skill based. All these factors make outsourcing Power BI consulting services to be the most sensible choice.
The sticker price of the licenses of Power BI only tells a part of the story. As of April 2025, Power BI Pro licenses are priced at $14 per user/per month, and the premium version costs $24 per user/per month.
Studies show that mid-market enterprises undervalue the overall cost of ownership of in-house BI projects by 40-60%.
Establishing a Power BI team internally demands considerable investment other than licensing. You will require certified experts that will attract high salaries, specialists with knowledge of DAX, data modelling skills, and performance optimization experience that do not come cheap. In addition to the cost of recruitment, there is training and certification.
The cost of infrastructure is an added expense. Power BI deployments at the enterprise level need to have strong data infrastructure, such as gateways, data warehouses, and cloud resources.
By contracting a Power BI consultant to your business, you save on these supplementary costs. No cost is incurred on downtime, no investment in continual training, and no long-term liability.
According to research conducted by HashStudioz, it is possible to save at least 30-50% of overall operational expenses by outsourcing specialized analytics in contrast to having a full-time internal department.
Speed plays a major role in business intelligence. The quicker you can extract actionable insights on your data, the earlier you achieve ROI.
It is an extensive process of developing an in-house team. It has a recruitment phase, an onboarding phase, and a discovery phase during which the new employee has to study the specific data architect of the company.
On the other hand, companies that choose to engage in the service of the specialized Power BI consultant will enjoy faster ROI compared with those that develop in-house Power BI capabilities.
This is simply because consultants come with ready-to-use templates, accelerator packs, and proven frameworks that will take months for internal teams to build.
Speed is where this approach really helps. With the right expertise, Power BI can be set up in just a few weeks, allowing teams to start using insights without long delays. Experienced professionals also take care of more complex areas such as data modeling and security, which require a strong technical background. Another benefit is that consulting partners stay updated with Power BI updates, so your setup does not fall behind as the market changes. While this approach means depending on external experts instead of developing in-house skills, it works well for businesses that are trying out Power BI for the first time or planning to scale gradually.
Power BI is often sold as a tool that is easy to use, which makes most companies believe that an average IT employee or a data analyst could learn to use it within minutes. There are three types of high-level skills needed in enterprise-level Power BI.
Data Engineering- Cleaning and shaping messy data with M-code and Power Query.
Architectural Modelling- Expertise and proficiency in DAX (Data Analysis Expression) to develop sophisticated calculations, which becomes swift despite the increase of data.
Design Information- The user interaction expertise needed to ensure the reports are easy to understand by the executives.
Power BI Consultant keeps up with the rapid development. Microsoft issues new releases from time-to-time that include new visuals, data models, connectors, and reporting features.
Having to struggle with such changes and still remain in the day-to-day business poses a challenge to in-house teams. Power BI consultants are in the business to be on the frontline, and their clients reap the advantages of the capabilities without investing time specifically in it.
The absence of formal governance is one of the most serious threats of in-house teams. Organizations in most cases end up in a state of Data Chaos without a professional consultant.
Power BI Consultants apply the blueprints of governance of Microsoft at the very beginning. They define proper audit logs, establish the policy of data loss prevention, and develop standard operating procedures.
In governance blueprints, the Power BI Consultant applies Row-Level Security (RLS) to ensure only authorized individuals can access the data, and develop a standardized environment to store, manage, and share your data efficiently.
Business operations are dynamic. Sometimes, you may require intensive support, and other days, when the operations are steady, you’ll need less intensive engagement.
For instance, it could have a tremendous requirement of development in a merger or digital transformation initiative.
Employing in-house teams will generate fixed expenditure. The salary has to be paid whether the workload is heavy or light.
Hiring a Power BI Consultant is a variable cost model, providing elastic resourcing, which perfectly matches business phases.
When you have bigger projects that you need to execute, you can hire the services accordingly, and when it comes to less demanding tasks, you can scale down and only pay the capacity you require.
This flexibility removes the delays in the recruitment cycles and eliminates the challenge of downsizing in the case of decline in the intensity of projects.
The tech industry is no exception when it comes to employee turnover. When an organization has in-house Power BI experts, losing them may be disastrous.
They carry with them the logic of the reports, and leave the organization with a complex system, which none has the knowledge about how to correct or upgrade.
By hiring Power BI Consultant, there is continuity of the operations. In case one consultant is not available, the other team member will be able to fill in with all the project knowledge. This eliminates the key person risk and ensures that the business pipeline does not go offline at any stage of your business.
The decision to choose between an in-house Power BI team or hiring a Power BI consultant will be determined by the specific business requirements and circumstances. Companies that have substantial financial resources have long-term projects and are willing to invest in permanent BI systems might rationalize internal investment.
But, in the case of most of the mid-market organizations, hiring a Power BI consultant has strong merits. Power BI consultants have an upper hand in the financial equation.
Above all, the risk of unsuccessful implementations which would force the company to rework the projects at high costs, is eliminated by collaborating with the Power BI consultants, who have already overcome such obstacles many times. Power BI consultant can provide an organization with better results when it aims to turn your data into competitive strength.
1. Isn’t it cheap to simply make my existing team learn Power BI?
Although it looks like a better choice to train your in-house team rather than hiring a consultant. It is important to know that the invisible price of training and setting up an infrastructure is too high. With an expert consultant, you get a completely working product.
2. Does an in-house team offer the same degree of security?
Internal employees are reliable, but they might lack the expertise that is possessed by a Power BI consultant. They install professional grade security at an early stage, which minimizes the risk of data leaks.
3. What will happen if the consultant departs?
Professional Power BI consultants make your team more independent than you think. They aim to establish a strong base and subsequently train your team to utilize it.
