Field notes from the housing data layer.
Practical writing on NEC Housing, DRS, Power BI and the craft of reporting that housing teams actually trust. No vendor spin, just what we have learned building it.
Why a micro business took on an apprentice
We've taken on our first apprentice on the new AI and Automation Practitioner standard. Why a micro business invests in people despite the risk, and what it means for local authorities and the housing sector.
Finding the join NEC never shows you
NEC has a thousand-plus tables and the joins you need often aren't declared foreign keys. Here's the wiki and join-path finder we built so you stop guessing.
The NEC knowledge that usually walks out the door
The person who knows how your NEC data really works is one resignation away from taking it with them. Here's how we wrote that knowledge down.
Getting your reporting logic out of Business Objects
Years of report logic sit locked in BusinessObjects files. Migrating off shouldn't mean rebuilding from memory. Here's the extractor that pulls it out.
Power BI Desktop, June 2026: what actually matters for housing reporting
Microsoft's June release leans hard into AI-assisted authoring and finally makes DAX user-defined functions production-ready. Here is the housing-data read on what to switch on, and what can wait.
Row-level security that survives a reorg
Most RLS breaks the first time the org chart changes. A pattern that bends with the structure instead of hard-coding it.
What appointment data tells you that the KPI doesn't
First-time-fix is a lagging summary. The booking and reschedule trail underneath it is where the operational story actually sits.
The reporting nobody trusts, and how to earn it back
Trust in a dashboard is lost in one wrong number and rebuilt slowly. A short field guide to closing the credibility gap.
Reference values, decoded: FIRST_REF_VALUES in plain English
The lookup table behind half of NEC reporting, why its codes are not unique across domains, and how that quietly drops rows.
One source of truth is a habit, not a warehouse
You do not buy a single source of truth. You maintain one. Why governance beats tooling every time it is tested.
DAX measures that read like sentences
Measures are read far more often than they are written. Naming and structure that let the next analyst follow the logic.
Voids, repairs and the joins between them
Where the void lifecycle meets the works-order spine, the column that states the link, and why inferring it from dates makes the numbers drift.
Joining DRS appointments back to the work that triggered them
Scheduling data is only useful joined to its cause. The bridge between DRS and NEC, and the keys that make it hold.
Let's make your housing data make sense.
Tell us where your reporting hurts. We'll tell you, plainly, whether we can help and how we'd approach it.