About
Accounting Insights was founded in 2018 by finance professionals who wanted better reporting than Excel could offer, and who realised the technology to build it existed but the people who could apply it to finance did not. That's still what we do.
Origin
Which was before Microsoft's official launch of the product. At the time it was called "Power BI Designer" and virtually nobody outside Microsoft was using it seriously. Hugh — who had led finance functions and prepared monthly management reports before moving into consulting — started experimenting with it because he was frustrated with the limitations of Excel-based management reporting.
Accounting Insights was founded three years later, in 2018, once it was clear that what Hugh had figured out about Power BI for finance was worth building a firm around. Dozens of projects later, the core insight hasn't changed. Power BI is a genuinely powerful tool for finance reporting, but only in the hands of someone who understands what finance reporting actually needs to do. All too often, that isn't the person building the report.
How we hire
Without exception. This is our single most important hiring principle, and it's the thing every other Power BI consultancy either can't or won't say.
We'd rather train a finance expert on Power BI than a Power BI expert on finance.
The reason is simple. The Power BI part of a finance reporting project is teachable in weeks. The finance part — knowing what a proper variance analysis looks like, why period-end accruals matter, how to consolidate across entities, when a chart is telling the truth and when it isn't — takes years of finance work to internalise. If we hire for the Power BI side, we get consultants who can build reports the finance team won't use. If we hire for the finance side, we get consultants who build reports the finance team relies on.
The team
Co-founder · Led finance functions
Building finance reporting on Power BI since January 2015. Regular contributor to AccountingWEB and author of the ABC of Power BI series.
Role · Qualification
Placeholder card. Bio to follow.
More team bios to be added.
Writing
Hugh writes an ongoing series for AccountingWEB — the UK's leading independent community for accounting professionals — introducing Power BI to finance teams, one concept at a time. Written from the perspective of finance, not the perspective of Power BI.
It's the closest thing to an on-ramp for finance teams who want to understand what Power BI can do for them, without wading through generalist Power BI documentation.
What we don't do
There are plenty of excellent free resources online for learning Power BI as a tool. We're happy to point you at them.
Once you've done that groundwork, we're glad to offer finance-specific Power BI training — the layer above general Power BI knowledge, tailored to how finance teams actually work with reporting.
A free 30-minute call. No commitment. We'll listen to what you're trying to do and tell you honestly whether we're the right fit.
Get in touch