The challenge
Surrey Choices supports hundreds of people with learning disabilities and autism across Surrey, providing day services, employment support, respite care and Shared Lives placements. It’s a complex, people-centred operation, and like many organisations of its scale, the data behind it had grown just as complex.
Financial data lived in Xero. Referrals and CRM in Zoho. Workforce records in BrightHR. Health and safety in EvotixAssure. Accommodation in Cloudbeds. Each system did its job, but none of them talked to each other. When the leadership team needed answers, someone had to manually pull reports from multiple platforms, reconcile conflicting figures, and hope the result was reliable enough to act on.
For an organisation where decisions about capacity, staffing and finances have a direct impact on the people it serves, that wasn’t good enough. Leadership needed a single, trusted view of the whole business in real time.
Our approach
InsyteGroup was brought in to design and deliver that view from the ground up. Working directly with Keith Chandler, Chief Finance and Resources Officer, and the wider leadership team, we moved through four structured stages: data integration, design, build and deployment.
We started by connecting the systems. Automated ETL pipelines pulled data from each source application into a dedicated SQL database hosted by InsyteGroup, with flexible SharePoint ingestion for any sources that couldn’t be fully automated. In total, ten data flows were built, spanning cashflow and management accounts, HR, capacity modelling, referrals, new and renewed business, targets, and vocational project customer tracking. Every part of the organisation’s operation was accounted for.
Before writing a line of dashboard code, we ran collaborative prototyping sessions with Surrey Choices stakeholders. The goal was simple: build something shaped by the people who would actually use it, not by technical assumptions.
“Genuinely committed to understanding our needs.”
Keith Chandler, Chief Finance and Resources Officer, Surrey Choices
From those sessions, we developed a single Power BI Semantic Model that harmonised all the data sources, then built out the full suite of executive dashboards. The solution was deployed directly into Surrey Choices’ Power BI environment, with every measure validated against source data before go-live.
“The planning phase was clear and well-structured, and they executed flawlessly.”
Keith Chandler, Chief Finance and Resources Officer, Surrey Choices
The result
The project was delivered ahead of schedule and on budget, completed in just under two months.
Where leadership once had to chase figures across five different platforms, they now open a single dashboard. The executive team can see their financial position at a glance: cash flow, debtor status and a full finance summary, alongside workforce, capacity and referral insight.
Twenty views of the business. One place. Updated automatically.
“Extremely professional and a high-quality product that exceeded expectations.”
Keith Chandler, Chief Finance and Resources Officer, Surrey Choices
Surrey Choices awarded InsyteGroup 5.0 out of 5.0 across quality, schedule, cost and likelihood to recommend.
“Superb service and value, highly recommended.”
Keith Chandler, Chief Finance and Resources Officer, Surrey Choices
