Client: Surrey Choices
Industry: Social Services / Not-for-Profit
Size: 200–500 employees
Location: Surrey, England
Project Duration: October – December 2025
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.
InsyteGroup was brought in to design and deliver that view from the ground up. Working directly with Keith Chandler, Chief Finance & 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 & 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 raw data by key stakeholders before go-live.
“The planning phase was clear and well-structured, and they executed flawlessly.” – Keith Chandler, Chief Finance & Resources Officer, Surrey Choices
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. Surrey Choices’ executive team can see their financial position at a glance: cash flow, debtor status, and a full finance summary, alongside workforce health metrics including sickness rates, agency spend, vacancies, and staff leavers. Operational views give visibility into service capacity and customer volumes across programmes including Short Breaks, Shared Lives, and Employability. The referral pipeline and new business activity are tracked in real time. And compliance-sensitive areas – safeguarding, incidents and accidents, compliments and concerns – are surfaced alongside everything else, so nothing gets missed.
Twenty views of the business. One place. Updated automatically.
“Extremely professional and a high-quality product that exceeded expectations.” — Keith Chandler, Chief Finance & Resources Officer, Surrey Choices
Surrey Choices awarded InsyteGroup 5.0 / 5.0 across quality, schedule, cost, and likelihood to recommend.
“Superb service and value — highly recommended.” — Keith Chandler, Chief Finance & Resources Officer, Surrey Choices
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