Resources & Downloads

What happens when Business Central becomes the de facto reporting tool for your whole organisation - and why separating your reporting layer from your ERP is one of the highest-leverage decisions a mid-market finance team can make. See our Business Central analytics work on the website for more. Last updated 23 June 2026.

Most mid-market organisations don't need Fabric yet. This honest assessment covers what it does well, what it doesn't, and the questions to answer before committing to a rollout. See our Microsoft Fabric work on the website for more. Last updated 17 June 2026.

Microsoft Fabric licensing is genuinely complicated. This whitepaper breaks down F-SKUs, capacity units, and the per-user vs capacity decision - with a worked example for a 200-person UK business. See our Microsoft Fabric work on the website for more. Last updated 23 June 2026.

AI tools don't fix bad data - they amplify it. This guide covers the data foundations you need to get value from AI: clean semantics, governed metrics, and a reliable data layer that AI agents can actually trust. See our AI work on the website for more. Last updated 23 June 2026.

A buyer's guide for operations and finance leaders commissioning their first analytics engagement. What to ask, what to avoid, how to evaluate proposals, and the red flags that indicate a supplier isn't right for your organisation. See our analytics and AI work on the website for more. Last updated 17 June 2026.

How to build a business case for analytics investment and track whether it's delivering. Includes a framework for quantifying decision quality improvement, time saved, and error reduction across your reporting estate. See our analytics and AI work on the website for more. Last updated 17 June 2026.

A practical migration guide for organisations moving from Qlik, Tableau, MicroStrategy, or on-premise SSRS to a modern analytics platform. Covers sequencing, risk management, and how to avoid rebuilding the same problems in a new tool. See our data platform and warehouse work on the website for more. Last updated 17 June 2026.

A structured approach to identifying which spreadsheet processes in your organisation are ready to be replaced - and the right order to tackle them. Includes a cost model for quantifying the hidden overhead of manual reporting. See our data platform and warehouse work on the website for more. Last updated 23 June 2026.

Most organisations don't need real-time data - they need right-time data. This whitepaper helps you identify which decisions genuinely require sub-hour freshness and which are perfectly served by overnight or hourly refreshes. See our analytics and AI work on the website for more. Last updated 23 June 2026.

Why most self-service BI rollouts are abandoned within a year - and what the ones that succeed do differently. A practical guide to designing governed self-service that end users actually adopt. See our analytics and AI work on the website for more. Last updated 23 June 2026.

A single-page data strategy framework for mid-market organisations. Covers current state, target state, priorities, and success metrics - structured so you can present it to a board or leadership team without a 40-slide deck. See our data strategy and leadership work on the website for more. Last updated 23 June 2026.

Why the Power BI semantic model - not the report - is the real deliverable of any analytics engagement, and how treating it as the primary asset changes how you build, maintain, and govern your entire reporting estate. See our Power BI work on the website for more. Last updated 23 June 2026.

Most analytics projects deliver something useful on day one and gradually decay into distrust. This whitepaper diagnoses the root causes - from missing ownership to semantic drift - and prescribes the practices that prevent it. See our analytics and AI work on the website for more. Last updated 23 June 2026.

Slow Power BI reports are almost never a Power BI problem. This diagnostic guide walks through the real causes - data model design, DAX inefficiency, source query performance, and capacity - and how to fix each one. See our analytics and AI work on the website for more. Last updated 23 June 2026.

Should your next analytics investment be a hire or a consultancy engagement? A framework for mid-market leaders to evaluate the build-vs-buy decision, with guidance on role design, onboarding risk, and when each option makes more sense. See our data strategy and leadership work on the website for more. Last updated 17 June 2026.

How to retire Qlik well, keep your users on side, and end up on a platform built for the next ten years. Covers what is genuinely different about a Qlik migration, the pitfalls we see most often, and what good looks like at the end. QlikView and Qlik Sense both covered, with typical licence savings of 40 to 60 percent. See our Power BI work on the website for more. Last updated 3 July 2026.

What changes, what does not, and how to bring your most invested users with you. Written from UK and Ireland mid-market projects, this playbook covers the three-phase approach from audit to switch-off, how LOD expressions translate, and how to carry power users rather than lose them. See our Power BI work on the website for more. Last updated 3 July 2026.

Modernising paginated reporting without losing the reports your business actually runs on. Covers the audit-first approach that typically retires over 60 percent of the SSRS estate, the choice between paginated and interactive destinations, and how to use the migration as a chance to consolidate. See our Power BI work on the website for more. Last updated 3 July 2026.

The framework we use when clients ask whether Fabric or Snowflake is the right answer. Six dimensions that decide it, where each platform wins, and the scenarios that make the answer obvious in either direction. We are a Microsoft consultancy, but we do not pretend the answer is always Microsoft. See our Microsoft Fabric work on the website for more. Last updated 3 July 2026.

Both platforms can do most things. The question is which fits your team, your workload, and your existing estate. This guide covers the six dimensions that decide it, written from delivery experience, and explains why team shape often outranks the technology. See our Microsoft Fabric work on the website for more. Last updated 3 July 2026.

Native reporting, Jet, Power BI, or Fabric. Four genuine options, four vendor narratives, no clear winner across every use case. We work with all four every week. This guide is how we help clients pick, and why most businesses end up using two. See our Business Central analytics work on the website for more. Last updated 3 July 2026.

The standard we use to review every Power BI report before it goes live. Sixteen categories and over a hundred individual checks covering the things that decide whether a report gets used or quietly ignored. Plain English, no scoring matrix. See our Power BI work on the website for more. Last updated 3 July 2026.

A working assessment of analytics maturity built for mid-market, not enterprise. Score your organisation across five dimensions on a three-level scale to find your stage, your profile, and your clear next move. Free to use, no licence required. See our analytics and AI work on the website for more. Last updated 3 July 2026.

The licensing economics of Power BI and Microsoft Fabric, and the five overspending patterns we see most often. Covers Pro, PPU, and capacity, the F64 inflection point where viewers become free, and why what most organisations pay is meaningfully higher than the list price. See our Microsoft Fabric work on the website for more. Last updated 3 July 2026.

Engineering discipline for Microsoft Fabric and Azure: medallion architecture, change data capture, version control, and DataOps. The difference between platforms that scale and platforms that need rebuilding in three years is not the technology, it is the discipline applied at every layer. See our data platform and warehouse work on the website for more. Last updated 3 July 2026.

Trust is the constraint, not intelligence. Why AI investment fails for reasons that have nothing to do with the technology, the three failure modes that destroy AI trust, and the framework we apply across every AI engagement. One rule changes everything: cite or do not conclude. See our AI work on the website for more. Last updated 3 July 2026.

Retrieval-augmented generation, embeddings, vector search, and foundation models on Microsoft Azure. What custom GenAI actually delivers beyond Copilot, the three approaches from prompting to fine-tuning, and why the right architecture and trust framework are the difference between useful applications and confident-sounding rubbish. See our AI work on the website for more. Last updated 3 July 2026.

How mid-market businesses get real value from machine learning on Microsoft Fabric, Azure ML, and Power BI. Five well-established techniques, each answering a specific commercial question, each running on the same Microsoft data foundation, with typical payback in six to twelve months. See our AI work on the website for more. Last updated 3 July 2026.

Trusted analytics, built for decisions. An introduction to Hopton Analytics: who we are, how we work, and how we help mid-market organisations across the UK and Ireland build governed reporting and data platforms on Microsoft Fabric, Power BI, and Azure. See our data strategy and leadership work on the website for more. Last updated 3 July 2026.

How we run discovery before we build anything: eight plain business questions, turned into a prioritised plan for your report, Fabric model, or agent. See our analytics and AI work on the website for more. Last updated 4 July 2026.