Which Industries Use Power BI in Australia? An Industry-by-Industry Guide

The question almost never arrives on its own. It arrives attached to something else: a month-end that took five days again, a board pack assembled from four exports and a VLOOKUP, a production meeting that opens with two hours of spreadsheet work nobody has costed. Somebody has suggested Power BI. Somebody else has asked whether it is actually used in our industry, which is a polite way of asking whether this is a real tool or a consultant's idea.

That second question deserves a straight answer, and the straight answer has two halves. Yes — Power BI is in use across every major Australian industry, and the reasons differ enough by industry to matter. And no — nobody can honestly tell you which industry uses it most, because the dataset that would settle it does not exist. Most articles that rank Power BI adoption by industry are working from numbers with no published method behind them.

So this guide does something narrower and more useful. It goes industry by industry and sets out what the reporting actually has to answer, which systems the data sits in, which KPIs get argued about, and what makes the job hard. If your industry is in here and the description of your month-end feels uncomfortably accurate, that is the point.

The short answer

Power BI fits well in industries that are multi-site, shift-based, regulated or funded, or contract-based — and fits badly where a business is small, single-site, and can see everything it needs in one accounting file.

On that test, the strongest fits in Australia are manufacturing, aged care and regulated care, wholesale and distribution, mining and resources services, transport and logistics, and project-based engineering. Health care, finance, retail, construction, government, energy, agriculture and technology all use it too, with caveats worth reading before you spend anything — construction in particular, where the sector-wide picture and the head-contractor picture are almost opposites.

Why nobody can tell you which industry uses Power BI "most"

This is the part competitor articles skip, so it is worth stating plainly.

What the ABS actually measures

The Australian Bureau of Statistics does measure business technology use, and its numbers are the best evidence available — but it measures categories, never products. We enumerated the full Business Characteristics Survey ICT codelist. Every data item is of the form "ICTs used — Data analytics" or "ICTs used — Enterprise Resource Planning software". No item names a software product, vendor or brand anywhere in the collection. There is no ABS figure for Power BI, Tableau or Qlik, and there never has been.

What the ABS does tell us is more useful than a brand share anyway. For the year ended 30 June 2022, business use of information technology shows data-analytics use at 11.6% of businesses with 20–199 employees against 39.2% of those with 200 or more, and ERP use at 18.6% against 63.3%. Separately, in 2024-25 the ABS reports 10% of Australian businesses actively collecting or analysing data to inform decisions. Cite that as a level only: the question wording changed, and the series cannot be read as a trend.

What the vendor-database percentages are

If you have seen a table claiming Power BI holds a precise share of the BI market in mining, or that a given percentage of manufacturers use it, you have almost certainly seen output from a technographic data vendor. These firms infer a company's software stack from public signals — web page markup, job advertisements, public filings — and sell the result. We could not find a published sampling frame, method or Australian industry breakdown for any of them. The figures also skew towards large North American companies, because those are the companies that leave the most public signal. They are not measurements of Australian industry, and we do not use them.

The same caution applies to platform superlatives. We will not tell you Power BI is "the leading BI platform" or "the most trusted", because no source states that in a form anyone could check. Gartner evaluates the vendor rather than ranking vendors, names no winner, and keeps its market-share data behind a paid licence. A sentence you cannot source is not an argument.

What we use instead

Three evidence sources, all checkable, none of them a brand-adoption statistic.

Evidence	What it tells us	Limits
ABS technology adoption and business counts by industry and size	Which industries already hold their data in systems, and how many reachable businesses each has at 20+ staff	Adoption data is year ended 30 June 2022; industry-by-size counts are 30 June 2025
The Australian job market	Which industries are paying for the skill now, and who the buyer is — typically a finance or operations person with mandatory Advanced Excel and Power BI listed as "highly regarded", with no BI team above them	A qualitative sample, not a count. We publish no advertisement volumes: the boards we could not reach make any number unreliable
Statutory and contractual reporting load	Whether the reporting is optional or owed — to a regulator, an auditor, a funder or a principal contractor	Obligations change; each one here is dated and named

What actually decides whether Power BI fits your industry

The four operating shapes

Industry labels matter less than operating shape. Four shapes create reporting that a workbook cannot hold.

Multi-site. Every site keeps its own version, someone consolidates by hand, and nobody sees the group position until after the period closes.

Shift-based and workforce-driven. Cost is hours, hours are rostered against an award or EBA, and the roster lives in a different system from the payroll that pays it.

Regulated or funded. The number is owed to somebody outside the business on a fixed date, and increasingly must be traceable back to source.

Contract- or project-based. Revenue is claimed against a schedule of rates or a fee, cost accrues in three systems, and margin is discovered at the end unless someone builds the forecast.

If none of those describes you — one site, one system, one person reading the report — you probably do not need a build, and we say so again further down.

The adoption gap at 20–199 staff

The gap between 11.6% and 39.2% analytics use, and between 18.6% and 63.3% ERP use, is the whole market this guide is about. It describes businesses with the operational complexity of a large company and the tooling of a small one.

Scale gives the gap its size. Australia had 2,814,778 actively trading businesses at 30 June 2026, of which 73,691 employ 20 or more people — 2.6%(https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/economy/business-indicators/counts-australian-businesses-including-entries-and-exits/latest-release), released 18 August 2026]. Queensland held 15,173 of those larger businesses at June 2025.

How to read the sections below

Each section gives the reporting question, the KPIs with their definitions, and the systems the data usually sits in. Two warnings attach to all of them.

KPI formulas marked ⚖ vary materially between organisations and have to be agreed before anyone builds anything. That is not a technicality; it is the meeting where the project succeeds or fails.

Every system list is a set of candidates to confirm per client, not a claim of integration experience. No Australian source enumerates which software mid-market firms in each industry actually run.

Manufacturing

Why this sits first

Manufacturing has the highest share of businesses employing 20 or more people of any ANZSIC division except accommodation and food services — 7.9%, against 1.4% for construction and 1.0% for transport. Queensland has 1,435 manufacturers at that size.

The more useful number is the gap between two others. In the year ended 30 June 2022, 9.6% of manufacturers used enterprise resource planning software and 3.8% used data analytics. Read those together and the opportunity is one line: the transactional data already exists in an ERP, and almost nobody is reading it. Every figure in the morning meeting is being typed by a human who already knows it is out of date.

Anyone quoting you a percentage of Australian manufacturers running Power BI has made it up. No such figure exists in any official source.

What the reporting has to answer

Ask six people on a site what downtime means and you will get six answers. Does a 14-minute changeover count? Does a short stop under five minutes get logged at all, or does the operator only write it up once the line has been stopped long enough to notice? Is the stoppage at shift handover downtime, or is it line starve because upstream ran dry? Is planned maintenance excluded from availability, or only excluded if it was in the schedule at the start of the week?

Until somebody writes that rule down and puts it in a data model, OEE is a number two people can calculate differently and both be right. That is not a Power BI problem. It is what you settle first, and then Power BI enforces it — which is the actual value, because the argument stops recurring.

The volume is what breaks the workbook. Three lines, three shifts, twenty-odd working days is roughly 180 shift records a month before you touch the reason codes beneath them. The pack is built by exporting the production log, the payroll hours and the ERP sales ledger, then matching them with lookups against a part master the planner edits without telling anyone. It holds until the ERP gains a column, a date arrives as text, someone filters and saves, or the person who built it takes leave.

What gets built, in rough order of how fast it changes behaviour: the morning production board (yesterday by line — good units against plan, downtime Pareto by reason code, first-pass yield, scrap, refreshed before anyone arrives); downtime and maintenance; cost and variance, the pack the Financial Controller currently rebuilds in week two; margin by SKU and customer after freight and rebates; DIFOT and backorders; inventory and WIP ageing; and safety on a rolling twelve months, because a single month on a per-million-hours base is noise.

The KPIs, defined

KPI	Definition	Where the argument is
OEE	Availability × Performance × Quality, where Availability = Run Time ÷ Planned Production Time, Performance = (Ideal Cycle Time × Total Count) ÷ Run Time, Quality = Good Count ÷ Total Count	What counts as planned production time, and the ideal cycle time for an ageing line
First-pass yield	Units passing first time without rework ÷ units started	Whether re-tested product counts as first pass
Schedule adherence ⚖	Orders completed in the scheduled period ÷ orders scheduled	Part-completed orders, and resequencing mid-week
MTBF / MTTR	Operating hours ÷ number of failures; total repair time ÷ number of repairs	When the clock starts — fault raised, or fitter on site
Cost per unit ⚖	(Material + direct labour + absorbed overhead) ÷ good units produced	Overhead absorption, always
Purchase price variance	(Actual price − standard price) × quantity purchased	How often standards are reset
Material usage variance	(Actual quantity − standard quantity for actual output) × standard price	The accuracy of the bill of materials
Inventory turns / DIO	COGS ÷ average inventory value; 365 ÷ turns	Average of what — month-end snapshots or daily
DIFOT ⚖	Order lines delivered in full and on time ÷ total order lines	Whose date: customer request, or the date you confirmed
LTIFR / TRIFR	(Lost-time injuries ÷ hours worked) × 1,000,000; recordable injuries on the same base	Contractor hours in the denominator

The systems the data lives in

Candidates to confirm per site. ERP: SAP S/4HANA and Business One, Pronto Xi, MYOB Advanced, Dynamics 365 Business Central and Finance & Operations, Epicor, SYSPRO, Infor, NetSuite. Plant: MES, SCADA, AVEVA PI historians, Ignition, Rockwell FactoryTalk. Maintenance: SAP PM, Mex, or the ERP's own CMMS. Workforce: Humanforce, Deputy, UKG, Aurion, Frontier Software (chris21/iChris), Preceda, Definitiv, Employment Hero. Quality: LIMS, HACCP and SQF records, batch and lot sheets.

One practical point, because competitor content usually implies the opposite: on-premises ERP and SQL Server are reachable without opening the firewall. The on-premises data gateway "requires no inbound ports to your network—only outbound ports"(https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/data-integration/gateway/service-gateway-onprem)].

The one outcome we can point to

A Queensland manufacturer of around 250 staff: month-end went from five days to one, and the two hours of manual assembly before each morning meeting was replaced by reports that refresh on their own.

That is the only outcome claim we publish with a client behind it, and it is deliberately the only one quoted anywhere in this guide. Roughly ten other engagements are described by scope — what the reporting covered — with no number attached, because no number could be sourced.

Health care, aged care and social assistance

The statutory reporting load is the business case

Aged care carries the heaviest recurring reporting obligation of any Australian mid-market sector, and funding is tied directly to what gets reported. Residential providers lodge a Quarterly Financial Report through GPMS four times a year, report 24/7 registered nurse coverage through GPMS every calendar month — including in months where an exemption applies — and from the 2025-26 Aged Care Financial Report must produce a Care Minutes Performance Statement audited by a registered company auditor under ASAE 3000. From 1 April 2026, quarterly performance is used to calculate the care minutes supplement for non-specialised metropolitan homes.

Minute targets, the naming of the residential funding instrument and the quality indicator set all change. Confirm them against health.gov.au rather than trusting any consultant's web page, including this one.

Assurance is what changes the character of the work. A number you cannot trace back to a roster line stops being an inconvenience and becomes an audit finding. "Where did this come from" is now a question with consequences.

Multi-site is why the workbook stops working

Over 3,100 providers deliver care through approximately 9,000 services — about 2.9 each, and 3.7 services per provider in residential care. Not-for-profits operate 59% of residential services, 64% of home care and 71% of home support outlets, and between 2017 and 2024 small residential services fell 29% while large ones rose 34%. Health Care and Social Assistance ran 3.3% data-analytics use and 1.6% ERP use in the year ended 30 June 2022, near the bottom of every division.

So: nine homes, each with a facility manager and a clinical system, one rostering system, one payroll, one ledger, and a quarter that closes whether or not the spreadsheet is ready. One workbook per home, consolidated by hand, is the standard state. The failure mode is not that it is wrong. It is that nobody can see the quarter tracking until the quarter is over, which is exactly when nothing can be done about it.

The addressable base is small and nameable: approximately 639 residential aged care businesses nationally employ 20 or more (451 at 20–199 and 188 at 200+), about 95 of them in Queensland, with Other Residential Care Services adding 214 and 56.

Disability and community services sit on the same footing. The NDIS had 774,456 participants with approved plans and 277,376 active providers at 31 March 2026, though almost all providers are sole traders; the reporting buyer is the organisation at 20-plus staff, where the questions are claim rejections, delivered-but-unclaimed revenue, cost per hour of support against the price cap, and plan utilisation before the plan lapses.

KPIs and systems

• Care minutes per resident per day ⚖ = total qualifying direct care minutes (RN, EN, personal care) ÷ occupied bed days, against the target for the quarter, with a registered-nurse sub-target. Which minutes qualify is the argument, and a costly one to get wrong.
• 24/7 RN coverage ⚖ = minutes in the month with at least one registered nurse on site and on duty ÷ total minutes in the month, lodged monthly.
• Occupancy = occupied bed days ÷ available bed days. Available, not licensed — a closed wing is the difference between a good month and a bad one.
• Agency share of direct care = agency hours ÷ total direct care hours; agency premium = agency cost per hour − employed cost per hour. Usually the first number that makes a board sit forward.
• Direct care cost per occupied bed day against funding revenue per occupied bed day.
• Roster variance = rostered hours and cost against worked hours and cost, including award and EBA loadings.
• Incidents per 1,000 occupied bed days by category ⚖, aligned to the national quality indicator definitions.
• EBITDA per bed, per home.

Systems, as candidates: AutumnCare, Leecare Platinum, Telstra Health, Person Centred Software in residential; AlayaCare, Procura, Visual Care in home care; Lumary, SupportAbility, Brevity in disability. Rostering and time through Humanforce, Easy Employer, Deputy, Roubler or UKG. Payroll through Frontier Software, Aurion, Preceda, Micropay, Definitiv or Employment Hero. Finance through TechnologyOne, Business Central, MYOB Advanced or Xero. Lodgement through GPMS, and PRODA/PACE for NDIS. None of these has a first-party Power BI connector(https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-query/connectors/), parsed 10 September 2026], so the honest answer is a SQL replica, ODBC, an API or a scheduled extract. Connect the systems you already run; do not believe anyone who says there is a button.

Wholesale, distribution and industrial supply

The data is already there

Wholesale Trade has the second-highest ERP use of any division at 13.4%, with 6.3% data-analytics use. 5.8% of its businesses employ 20 or more, and Queensland has 813 of them. The division recorded A$113.0bn in industry value added in 2024-25 with 623,000 people employed(https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/industry/industry-overview/australian-industry/latest-release)].

These are businesses with real inventory investment, real freight cost and margins thin enough that a small pricing error is the year's profit. The reporting question is almost always a dollar question, and almost always one of two: where is the margin going, and how much cash is sitting in stock that will not move.

The argument that happens in the meeting

The National Sales Manager's numbers and the Financial Controller's numbers do not agree, because one is reporting invoiced sales at list less discount and the other is reporting net sales after rebates, freight recovery and credit claims. Both have a spreadsheet. Neither is lying. The first job is to agree the definition of customer margin, publish it once, and stop running two sets of books on one business.

KPIs and systems

• GMROI = gross margin dollars ÷ average inventory at cost. The best one-number test of whether stock is earning its keep.
• Stock cover (weeks) = stock on hand ÷ average weekly demand; inventory turns = COGS ÷ average inventory; DIO = 365 ÷ turns.
• Fill rate ⚖ = order lines shipped complete ÷ order lines ordered. DIFOT adds the date.
• Cost to serve per order ⚖ = (pick + pack + freight + order admin cost) ÷ orders. Computing it properly is how a business discovers it has serviced a loss-making account for years.
• Freight recovery = freight revenue ÷ freight cost.
• Forecast accuracy (MAPE) = mean of |actual − forecast| ÷ actual across the SKU-location set.
• Customer margin = (net sales − COGS − rebates − freight − claims) ÷ net sales.
• Dead and slow stock ⚖ = value with no movement in N months ÷ total inventory value. N is the argument; pick it in the room and write it down.
• DSO = (accounts receivable ÷ credit sales) × days in period.

Systems, as candidates: Pronto Xi, MYOB Advanced, NetSuite, SAP Business One, Business Central, Micronet, Jiwa, Epicor; Unleashed, Cin7 or Netstock for inventory and forecasting; Datapel or Manhattan in the warehouse; MachShip and carrier portals for Australia Post/StarTrack, Team Global Express, Toll and TNT; Shopify, WooCommerce and EDI feeds to the grocery and hardware chains; plus the pricing, rebate and trading-terms workbooks that live outside every system and always will.

Mining and resources services

Technically the readiest sector in the country

Mining has the highest ERP use of any division at 19.7% and near-highest data-analytics use at 14.8%, with 7.1% of its businesses employing 20 or more. Queensland holds 141 of Australia's 306 coal mining businesses and 21 of the 42 with 200 or more staff — half the nation's largest coal miners.

The market is not the mines. It is the supplier base: the Queensland resources sector reports spending A$35.8bn with local businesses and community organisations in 2024-25. The reporting work sits with Brisbane-headquartered maintenance, equipment and services businesses, and with the commercial packs they owe their principals every month.

KPIs and systems

The recurring problem is contract profitability by site and client, discovered months after the contract has gone bad. Revenue is claimed against a schedule of rates, cost accrues in payroll, plant hire and parts, and variations are delivered on site and claimed late or never. The monthly pack owed to the principal — hours, availability, safety, compliance — is assembled by a contracts administrator from four systems and a folder of PDFs.

• Physical availability = (calendar hours − downtime hours) ÷ calendar hours; utilisation ⚖ = operating hours ÷ available hours. Maintenance quotes availability, operations quotes utilisation, and the two have a standing disagreement about which one owns the shortfall.
• Maintenance cost per operating hour; planned maintenance compliance = planned tasks completed ÷ planned tasks scheduled; backlog hours.
• Unit cost = cost ÷ tonnes or bank cubic metres moved, against the contract schedule of rates.
• Shutdown earned value: SPI = earned value ÷ planned value; CPI = earned value ÷ actual cost.
• Contract margin by job = (revenue claimed − direct cost) ÷ revenue claimed, with WIP and unbilled revenue and variations submitted against approved beside it.
• TRIFR and LTIFR per million hours worked.

Systems to confirm: SAP, Pronto Xi, Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations or Epicor for ERP; SAP PM, IBM Maximo or Mex for maintenance; Assignar and Simpro in the field; Humanforce or Roubler for rostering with Aurion, chris21 or Preceda for payroll; Caterpillar VisionLink and Komatsu KOMTRAX for plant telematics; AVEVA PI historians, SCADA, weighbridge and laboratory systems for process data; Cintellate, INX, myosh or HSI for HSE. Plus SharePoint, Excel and the principal's own contractor portal, which is usually where the deadline comes from.

Finance, banking and insurance

Why finance is a buyer rather than a sector

Only 1.3% of the Financial and Insurance Services division employs 20 or more people, and Queensland has 249 such businesses. The larger institutions inside that count generally run their own BI teams and long security and procurement cycles.

Which is why finance belongs here as a function, not a sector. The CFO of the manufacturer, the aged care provider and the distributor is the buyer in every section above, and the reporting they own has a shape worth naming.

Multi-entity consolidation

The recurring build is the group with several ABNs — often three charts of accounts after two acquisitions, intercompany transactions that have to eliminate, and a monthly consolidation performed in a workbook by one person who is the only one who knows which tab does what.

The asset in that build is not the dashboard. It is the mapping table: entity to reporting entity, account to reporting line, cost centre to responsibility. Get it into a model with a proper date table and the statutory view and the management view stop being two separate month-end jobs.

Around it sit measures nobody argues about — budget against actual against forecast, working capital and DSO, EBITDA by entity and by responsibility, cash conversion — and one that everybody argues about: how corporate overhead is allocated to the entities carrying it ⚖. Agree it before the first chart.

Logistics, transport and supply chain

Target the fleet operator with 20 to 200 people, never "the transport industry". Transport, Postal and Warehousing grew 8.1% in industry value added to A$109.8bn in 2024-25 with 691,000 people employed, but only 1.0% of its 261,109 businesses employ 20 or more, because owner-drivers dominate the count. Queensland has 577 transport businesses at 20-plus staff, 281 of them in road freight, and holds 23.2% of the national 20-plus transport base — an overweight.

The reporting question is margin by lane and by customer, and the answer is hard to get because cost sits in fuel cards, subcontractor invoices, maintenance and payroll while revenue sits in a rate card that has been amended by email. Fuel levy recovery is reconciled to nobody's satisfaction. On-time performance is disputed with the customer rather than evidenced, which matters most at rate-negotiation time.

KPIs: cost per kilometre = total operating cost ÷ km; cost per pallet or consignment ⚖; revenue per km; empty running = unladen km ÷ total km; utilisation ⚖ = capacity used ÷ capacity available, where capacity is cube, weight or pallet spaces and you must pick one and say which; on-time pickup and delivery; DIFOT; fuel burn in L/100km and levy recovery = levy billed ÷ fuel cost variance; maintenance cost per km; damage and claims rate; detention and yard dwell; driver turnover.

Chain of Responsibility duties reach beyond the driver to the parties who can influence a heavy vehicle journey, which is why compliance evidence has to be assembled across rostering, maintenance and despatch. Confirm the detail with the NHVR before relying on it — every readily reachable summary is published by a commercial compliance vendor.

Systems as candidates: MachShip, CartonCloud, TransVirtual or Datapel for TMS and WMS; EROAD, Teletrac Navman, Geotab or Microlise for telematics and electronic work diaries; fuel cards; Mex or Fleetio for maintenance; MYOB, Xero or Pronto in finance; customer portals and EDI; and the rate-card spreadsheets.

Construction

Why the numbers mislead

Construction has the lowest data-analytics use (1.0%) and the lowest ERP use (1.1%) of any ANZSIC division, and 98.3% of its 462,939 businesses employ fewer than 20 people. Read those at face value and you conclude construction does not do reporting.

The correct reading is different. The division is enormous and almost entirely composed of one- and two-person trade businesses, which drags every average to the floor. The sector-wide statistic tells you nothing about the head contractor with 120 staff running eight jobs and a subcontractor ledger.

What works at head-contractor tier

At that tier the reporting is project accounting, and it is the same shape as the engineering and mining sections: cost to complete against committed cost, progress claims certified against claimed, retentions falling due, variations submitted against approved against paid, and cash flow by job and by month. Margin erosion by package is the report that changes a behaviour, because it names which subcontract package is going backwards while the job as a whole still looks fine.

The systems are project and commercial platforms rather than a general ledger — Procore, Aconex, Primavera on delivery, Simpro or Assignar in the field, with the accounting system holding the actuals.

Approach named head contractors and the civil tier. Never approach "the construction industry".

Retail — and FMCG suppliers to the chains

Two different businesses hide under one word, and their reporting questions barely overlap: a group running sites, and a supplier selling into Coles, Woolworths, Metcash or Bunnings.

Queensland has 1,375 retail businesses employing 20 or more people — among the largest 20-plus counts of any division in the state — while retail nationally records 6.2% data-analytics use.

For a multi-site group the reporting that earns its keep is wage cost as a percentage of sales, by quarter-hour, against door count — because that is the number that decides next fortnight's roster. Then gross margin after markdown and shrinkage rather than before, sell-through by style and week, stock cover in weeks by store, and like-for-like sales ⚖, where the comparable-store set has to be agreed before the first chart or the board will argue about the denominator instead of the trend.

For the FMCG supplier the argument is trade spend: scan data from the chains' supplier portals and from Nielsen, Circana or Quantium, set against your own despatches and against the deductions on the remittance advice, with promotional return calculated after deductions and freight, per promotion, per chain. Range-review preparation is its own reporting job with its own deadline.

Systems usually in scope: POS (Lightspeed, Retail Express, Shopify POS, Square), ERP (Pronto Xi, Dynamics 365 Commerce, Apparel21, NetSuite), rostering (Deputy, Tanda, Humanforce), and Xero or MYOB at the smaller end.

A single store or single venue does not need this. A group of eight with a real finance function does.

Professional services

Accounting, legal and advisory firms all ask the same two questions: which engagements make money, and when does the cash arrive. Professional, Scientific and Technical Services is A$205.4bn of industry value added with 1.34 million people employed, and 7,733 businesses at 20-plus staff nationally, 1,379 of them in Queensland, against 9.4% data-analytics use.

The metric that matters most is the one most often missing: lock-up days = WIP days + debtor days. Around it sit utilisation ⚖ = billable hours ÷ available hours, where the denominator is always the argument (leave, training, business development); realisation = revenue recognised ÷ standard value of hours worked; effective hourly rate = net fee revenue ÷ billable hours; write-off percentage; and margin per matter or engagement.

Systems: practice management (Actionstep, LEAP, Smokeball, Affinity or Elite 3E in law; APS, Xero Practice Manager, FYI or Handisoft in accounting), time capture, trust accounting with its own reconciliation discipline, and the partner-level spreadsheet nobody admits to.

The reporting is not technically hard. It is politically hard, because it shows whose clients are unprofitable.

Engineering

Project-based engineering firms run on two numbers the accounting system cannot produce on its own: estimate to complete, and claimable variations. Queensland has 284 businesses in Engineering Design and Engineering Consulting employing 20 or more.

KPIs: forecast at completion = actual cost to date + estimate to complete, with the estimate maintained by the project manager rather than derived; SPI = earned value ÷ planned value and CPI = earned value ÷ actual cost; project gross margin = (fee − direct cost) ÷ fee; WIP and unbilled days; variations submitted against approved against claimed; backlog coverage = secured fee ÷ average monthly fee revenue.

Systems: Deltek Vantagepoint or Ajera, BST Global, Synergy, Dynamics 365 Project Operations, WorkflowMax or Simpro, with Aconex, Primavera, Procore or Jira on the delivery side.

The honest constraint: a forecast-at-completion dashboard is only as good as the project managers' discipline in updating the estimate to complete. If they do not, the report will show optimism in high resolution. Fix the weekly routine first.

Government and public sector

Something uncomfortable belongs here. Our own demand research could not measure government properly — state and federal agencies advertise on their own portals, which our sampling did not reach, so the near-absence of departments in the data is a sampling artefact, not evidence of thin demand.

What is observable is the shape of the reporting. Queensland councils carry statutory financial sustainability measures — operating surplus ratio, asset sustainability ratio, net financial liabilities ratio — alongside a capital programme reported as budget against actual against forecast every month, development application determination times running against a statutory clock, and service requests measured against response targets.

Systems: TechnologyOne (OneCouncil, Ci Anywhere), Civica Authority, Infor Pathway, Assetic or Confirm for assets, Maximo, Objective or Content Manager for records, Aurion or chris21 for payroll.

Procurement is the real barrier, not capability. Panel arrangements, probity, and a budget cycle that does not care about your pipeline. Approach it as a deliberate, slow, relationship-led sector or not at all.

Energy and utilities

Few businesses, large ones, and better equipped than most: only about 530 electricity, gas, water and waste businesses nationally employ 20 or more people, 82 of them in Queensland, on 8.8% data-analytics and 10.5% ERP use and A$60.6bn in industry value added from around 150,000 workers.

The reporting splits three ways: network performance (SAIDI and SAIFI, unplanned outage minutes, asset condition and renewal), regulatory and capital (actual capital expenditure against the regulatory allowance, programme delivery, the reporting owed to the regulator), and retail or customer (unaccounted-for water or gas, connection cycle time, bad debt and hardship customers, meter-to-cash exceptions).

Systems: SAP IS-U, Gentrack, Hansen, Utilibill, market data flows, SCADA and historians, Maximo or Mex for maintenance.

Hard to win, long cycle, excellent when won.

Agriculture and agribusiness

Be precise about who the buyer is. Agriculture reached roughly A$101bn in gross production value in 2025-26, and average broadacre farm cash income was forecast at A$227,000(https://www.agriculture.gov.au/abares), March 2026]. Only 1.3% of the division employs 20 or more people — 538 businesses in Queensland. A family farm does not buy a reporting build and should not be sold one.

The buyers are corporate agribusiness and primary processors — and a processor is a manufacturer, which is where this guide started.

Where reporting genuinely pays: cost of production per tonne or per kilogram of saleable product; carcase yield and MSA compliance rate in red meat; feed conversion ratio in intensive livestock; water use per tonne and megalitres per hectare under an allocation; yield and gross margin per hectare per paddock; and the NLIS and traceability records a customer audit will ask for.

Systems: AgriWebb, Agworld, Phoenix, Figured sitting on Xero, weighbridge and grading systems, plus the grower and processor portals.

Technology

The sector least likely to need outside help, and it is worth saying so.

Software companies already have analytics in the product — event data in Amplitude or Mixpanel, a warehouse in Snowflake or BigQuery, transformations in dbt, and engineers who write SQL. Nobody there needs help building a chart.

What they call about is the other half: annual recurring revenue that does not reconcile to the general ledger, net revenue retention computed three ways by three people, customer acquisition cost payback that ignores implementation cost, and gross margin per customer once hosting and support are allocated. That is a finance data model problem rather than a product analytics problem, and the two teams rarely talk.

If your engineering team has capacity and a clear definition of ARR, build it yourself. If the board is asking and finance and product disagree on the number, the argument is the work.

Education — and the sectors we would not chase as sectors

Queensland has 469 education and training businesses employing 20 or more. Combined Primary and Secondary Education is unusually large-business heavy: 154 of 590 businesses nationally employ 200-plus staff, 34 of them in Queensland. Independent and combined schools are multi-campus, board-governed and deeply reporting-bound — enrolment and attrition by year level, fee debtors and discount leakage, staff-to-student ratios, census and disability data collections, and a capital programme. Systems: TASS, Synergetic, Edumate, Sentral or Compass, with aXcelerate, VETtrak or Wisenet and AVETMISS reporting on the RTO side. Procurement is slow and budgets are tight; treat it as inbound.

Two sectors are worth naming as sectors we would not target, with reasons rather than adjectives.

Sector	Why not a sector play
Accommodation and food services	The most Queensland businesses at 20-plus staff of any division (2,144), but 3.5% data-analytics use, 1.6% ERP use and the thinnest margins. Multi-site groups only.
Rental, hiring and real estate services	The lowest 20-plus density of any division at 0.6%. The businesses that would benefit are rarely large enough to fund the work.

The questions every industry asks

Licensing and the F64 cliff

Power BI Pro is AU$21.00 per user per month and Premium Per User AU$35.90, paid yearly and excluding GST(https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/power-platform/products/power-bi/pricing), retrieved 10 September 2026]. Pro is included with Microsoft 365 E5.

The cliff is this: viewers can consume content without a per-user licence only on a P SKU or a Fabric capacity at F64 or above(https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/enterprise/licenses)]. Below that line, every person who opens a report needs a licence. Fabric capacity in Australia East is priced per capacity unit hour, so the arithmetic that matters is your reader count against capacity cost, and it usually decides itself.

One timing note before anyone quotes you a P SKU: they were removed from the purchase flow for new customers on 1 July 2024, with non-Enterprise Agreement renewals available until 1 January 2025. Re-check all pricing before you budget on it.

Excel

Power BI does not take Excel away from the people who need it, and this matters more in Australian mid-market finance teams than any dashboard feature. A published model can be opened in Excel as a live connected PivotTable, and exported data keeps its connection up to a 500,000-row limit, with row-level security enforced and the sensitivity label inherited by the workbook(https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/collaborate-share/office-integration/service-analyze-in-excel)].

The Financial Controller who has built the pack by hand for six years keeps their tool. They just stop being the only copy of the logic.

Xero, MYOB and the connector question

There is no Microsoft first-party Power BI connector for Xero, MYOB, QuickBooks, NetSuite, Shopify or Sage. Those route through OData, a third-party connector or a warehouse layer, and each of those choices has a cost and a failure mode. Microsoft describes Power BI as connecting to more than 100 data sources; the connector reference listed 194 when we parsed it, 95 of them Microsoft-authored. Neither figure includes your accounting system.

Ask any prospective supplier which of your systems they reach with a first-party connector and which they do not. The answer separates the people who have checked from the people who have not.

Data residency

Australia East and Australia Southeast support Power BI and all Fabric workloads. The Canberra regions are not listed, and the tenant's home region is fixed when the tenant is created rather than changed later(https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/admin/region-availability)].

On security accreditation, be careful what you accept as an answer. Power BI is not named in the in-scope service lists on Microsoft's IRAP pages, and "certification" is in any case a retired concept — the Australian Signals Directorate ceased its cloud services certification programme and certified list in 2020. Treat compliance as a question your diagnostic asks of the tenancy, never a capability a consultant asserts.

Refresh limits

Scheduled refresh is capped at eight times a day on shared capacity, against 48 on Premium, Premium Per User or Fabric(https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/connect-data/refresh-data)].

This is the constraint that most often surprises people mid-build, because a morning production meeting and an afternoon despatch review and an overnight load are three refreshes before anyone has asked for anything unusual. Decide it before you design, not after.

Access by site, region or manager

Row-level security filters rows by role, so a facility manager sees their home and a regional manager sees their group. One caveat to know before you design anything: RLS applies to Viewer permissions only, not to workspace Admin, Member or Contributor roles, and restricting columns rather than rows requires object-level security.

The reporting obligations arriving next

AASB S2 Group 3

Australia's mandatory climate reporting regime reaches its third and largest cohort for annual periods commencing on or after 1 July 2027. Group 3 captures entities meeting two of three thresholds: A$50m consolidated revenue, A$25m consolidated gross assets, or 100 employees.

Read those thresholds against the sections above. A 120-person manufacturer, a mid-size distributor, a residential aged care group — these are exactly the businesses in this guide, and most of them do not currently collect energy and emissions data in any system that reconciles to the general ledger. The reporting problem is not the disclosure. It is that the underlying numbers live in invoices, fuel cards and site meters that nobody has ever had to tie out.

Aged care assurance

The Care Minutes Performance Statement audited under ASAE 3000, described in the aged care section above, is the same change arriving earlier and in one sector. When an auditor samples a number, the question becomes whether you can walk it back to the roster line that produced it. Reporting built on a hand-consolidated workbook cannot answer that. Reporting built on a model with a documented source can.

Both obligations point the same way: traceability stops being a nicety and becomes the deliverable.

How to tell whether your industry is the problem

Usually it is not. The industry sets the shape of the question; the reporting fails for reasons that repeat across all of them.

Do not engage anyone, including us, if:

• One system holds the answer and one person reads the report. A Pro licence and a fortnight of your own effort will do it.
• The data is wrong at source — duplicate customers, no item master discipline, purchase orders raised after the invoice. A dashboard will publish the mess faster and more widely. Fix the process.
• You are mid-way through replacing the ERP. Build only what will survive the migration, or wait.
• Nobody has the authority to decide what a KPI means. No consultant can fill a governance vacuum; someone has to be able to end the argument.
• You have a capable analyst, an agreed model and simply no time. Buy hours, not strategy.

Outside help earns its fee when:

• The answer requires two or more systems that do not reconcile, and the reconciliation is currently done by a person.
• A statutory, contractual or audit deadline attaches to the number, so traceability matters more than presentation.
• Month-end includes days of manual assembly.
• More than one person maintains a workbook others depend on, and it has no owner, no documentation and no version control.
• Managers must see only their own site, team or entity, which means row-level security designed into the model rather than bolted on afterwards.
• You have already tried twice internally and the visuals were never the problem.

There is no published benchmark for Australian Power BI consulting fees, win rates or competitor counts — we looked and could not source one, so the table below names our own pricing and declines to invent anyone else's.

Option	What it costs	Works well when	Breaks down when
Buy licences and work it out yourself	Pro AU$21.00 or PPU AU$35.90 per user/month, paid yearly, ex GST	One or two systems, a numerate owner, real time to learn, low stakes on accuracy	The model needs designing, data crosses systems, or the person learning has a day job
Hire an analyst internally	Salary plus on-costs, ongoing. Most Australian employers default to this	There is continuous reporting work, someone senior can define and review the model, and you want the capability in-house	Nobody above them can specify or review the work; one person becomes the single point of failure, and often spends year one maintaining the spreadsheets they were hired to replace
Freelance developer	Quoted, usually the lowest build cost	A bounded dashboard with a clear specification and a competent internal owner	Documentation, handover and availability. When they move on, the model is undocumented
Large consultancy	Quoted, highest	Enterprise Fabric programmes, many source systems, formal governance, panel procurement, bench depth that survives someone leaving	Mid-market budgets and timelines. The person who sold it is rarely the person who builds it
Operator-led consultancy	Fixed-price entry: the A$1,950 diagnostic. Builds are quoted after the diagnostic, never priced off a page	The reporting problem is really an operations and definitions problem	A multi-year enterprise data platform programme across dozens of systems

What separates the builds that stick

Model before visuals. Agree the grain, the relationships and the date table first. A star schema built properly answers questions nobody has asked yet; a flat extract with 40 measures bolted on turns every new question into a new project.

Agree the definitions before you build. What downtime counts, what the utilisation denominator is, which stores are comparable, how overhead is absorbed. Have the arguing parties sign it, then build. Reporting projects fail at this step far more often than they fail in DAX.

One named owner, with a deputy — not a committee, not "IT". When a source schema changes at 4am, someone has to know before the 7am meeting, which means an alert and a person rather than an IT ticket.

Do not rebuild the spreadsheet. Its shape encodes years of workarounds; recreate it faithfully and you have bought a slower spreadsheet. Ask what decision each number supports, then design backwards. For the same reason, the dashboard the executive sketched is a statement of intent, not a specification.

Plan the handover from day one: documented model, named owner, training the team attends, and a runbook for when a refresh fails. Skipping training, then paying a consultant every time a filter needs changing, is not a saving. It is a subscription.

The measure of success is not how many dashboards exist. It is whether the manual assembly stopped.

Why Australian businesses choose Roar Data

We are in Brisbane — 10A Kitchener Street, Coorparoo — and we work across Queensland and Australia. There is no second office to hand you off to.

The work is operator-led. The founder spent more than 20 years in hands-on operations across manufacturing, pharmaceutical, glass packaging, FMCG, healthcare, aged care, finance and construction, progressing from the floor to operations leadership. That is why the conversation starts with how your month-end actually runs rather than with a tool demonstration.

Pricing is fixed at the front. The Reporting Clarity Diagnostic is A$1,950. Builds are quoted properly, after we know what we are building. Training and handover are part of delivery, not an upsell — the intention is that your team runs the reporting without us.

The one client-confirmed outcome we will put our name to: a Queensland manufacturer of around 250 staff whose month-end went from five days to one, and whose two hours of manual assembly before every morning meeting was replaced by reports that refresh on their own.

We deliberately publish no other numbers. Around ten further case studies describe the scope of what the reporting covered and nothing more, because we could not source the results that were once attached to them. We removed them rather than leave them up. Our Google rating is 5.0.

Where to start

If your month-end involves someone rebuilding the same workbook, start with the Reporting Clarity Diagnostic.

It is A$1,950, fixed. We map the systems the numbers come from, find where they stop reconciling, agree what each KPI actually means with the people who disagree about it, and give you a written findings document you can hand to your leadership team — a plan you can act on with us or without us. If you take it elsewhere, it still works.

Before that, a 15-minute call costs nothing and is not a sales process. Tell us which report hurts, who builds it, and which systems it comes out of. If the answer is that you do not need us, we will say so on the call. That outcome is cheaper for both of us than a project that should not have started.

FAQs

Which industry uses Power BI most in Australia?

Nobody knows, and anyone who gives you a percentage is guessing. The ABS measures technology by category and names no software product anywhere in its collection. The useful question is whether your operating shape is multi-site, shift-based, regulated or contract-based.

Is Power BI worth it for a business with 30 staff?

It depends on how many systems hold the answer, not on headcount. One system and one reader does not justify a build. Two systems that have to reconcile, and a deadline attached to the result, usually does.

Does Power BI connect to Xero or MYOB?

Not with a Microsoft first-party connector, and neither does QuickBooks, NetSuite, Shopify or Sage. It reaches them through OData, a third-party connector or a warehouse layer.

Where is our data stored?

In your tenant's home region. Australia East and Australia Southeast support Power BI and all Fabric workloads, and the home region is fixed when the tenant is created.

What does it cost to licence?

Power BI Pro is AU$21.00 per user per month and Premium Per User AU$35.90, paid yearly, excluding GST. Free viewers require a P SKU or F64-and-above capacity. Re-check before budgeting.

How often can reports refresh?

Eight times a day on shared capacity, 48 on Premium, PPU or Fabric. Real-time is a different architecture and a different conversation.

Do we have to stop using Excel?

No, and you should not. A published model opens in Excel as a live connected PivotTable with security still enforced. What changes is that the logic stops living in one person's workbook.

Sources and method

Business counts and industry-by-size figures come from ABS Counts of Australian Businesses: headline counts at 30 June 2026 from cube 8165DC01, and industry-by-size counts at 30 June 2025 from cube 8165DC02, aggregated by us and reconciled against the ABS headline. Technology adoption is the ABS Business Characteristics Survey for the year ended 30 June 2022, retrieved through the ABS SDMX API. Industry value added and employment are ABS Australian Industry 2024-25. Aged care structure is AIHW GEN Aged Care Data at 30 June 2025; aged care obligations are health.gov.au. NDIS participant and provider counts are the NDIA quarterly report for Q3 2025-26. Agricultural values are ABARES, March 2026. Resources supply-chain spend is a Queensland Resources Council figure from industry-commissioned modelling and is attributed as such, never as ABS. Product behaviour, licensing, connectors and limits are Microsoft Learn and Microsoft's Australian pricing pages, all retrieved 10 September 2026.

Reference dates differ between these sources and are never mixed inside a sentence. Small ABS cells are perturbed, which is why some counts read "approximately".

Four things we could not establish. There is no Power BI adoption statistic for any Australian industry in any official source. There is no reliable Australian search volume for the terms here. There is no defensible count of Australian job advertisements naming the skill — several boards refused automated access, so the demand findings are qualitative shape, not volume. And government demand is unmeasured rather than weak.

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