Service area: BI Reporting Client: Mansfield Solicitors & Advocates Limited

The challenge

As reporting volumes increased and clients required more detailed insight, Mansfield identified an opportunity to modernise its reporting process. Whilst the existing Excel-based MI reports delivered the information clients needed, producing and maintaining them became increasingly time-intensive as reporting requirements evolved.The reports worked, but the process behind them didn’t scale. Mansfield and their clients were also used to having direct access to the underlying data, so they could build and edit their own tables in Excel when they needed to explore specific areas in greater detail Any new solution had to preserve that flexibility, not take it away, while still keeping the underlying data secure and under Mansfield’s control.

There was also an underlying data quality issue. The Third Party Insurer field was a manual free-text entry, meaning the same insurer often appeared under multiple abbreviations, and formats across the dataset. This made accurate insurer-related reporting extremely difficult and required significant manual effort each month to identify and correct inconsistencies.

What we did

We rebuilt Mansfield’s client MIs from the ground up in Power BI, moving them from static, manually maintained spreadsheets to refreshable, interactive reports that update in a fraction of the time.

  • Automated the reporting process. The manual, hours-long  task has been replaced with a simple refresh, freeing the team up for higher value work instead of repetitive report maintenance.
  • Added deeper insight. Alongside the original metrics, we introduced rolling total figures so clients could see the overall trend in key metrics over time, not just how they’d changed from one month to the next.
  • Built in layered security. Security was applied at the workspace level first, with internal Mansfield users given higher permissions so they can access the underlying data model and work with the data directly if needed, while clients are restricted to viewing only what’s displayed in their report. Underneath that, we added row-level security (RLS) within the data model itself, so that even if a user was mistakenly given access to the workspace, they still couldn’t see any data that wasn’t theirs.
  • Kept the flexibility clients were used to. At Mansfield’s request we created a dedicated data table page within each report, with slicers on every column to replicate the experience of filtering in Excel as closely as possible. Because this is a visual table rather than a live connection to the data model, it keeps tight control over exactly what’s exposed from the underlying data source. For anyone who wants to take things further, the export to Excel functionality lets  users filter a table in Power BI, export it, and continue customising from there.
  • Cleaned up the data. To solve the Third Party Insurer problem, we built a normalisation table that groups every spelling and format variation under a single, accurate value per company. It’s reusable across multiple reports, which means Mansfield no longer has to correct this data by hand, and the figures themselves become more meaningful and trustworthy as a result.

The results

  • From hours to minutes. Mansfield’s client MIs no longer take hours to run and confirm at month end. They’re refreshed and checked in minutes, freeing up time for more in-depth analysis instead of routine report building.
  • On-demand access. Clients can check their MI at any point in the month rather than waiting for a report to be manually produced, and further functionality can be added as their needs evolve.
  • Room to grow. Power BI projects are built to flex. As Mansfield’s reporting needs change, whether that’s new metrics, new clients or new views of the data, the reports can grow and adapt alongside them.
  • A bespoke, branded experience. Every report carries Mansfield’s own branding alongside their clients’ logos, reinforcing the relationship between Mansfield and the clients they serve and giving each client a report that feels built for them specifically.