A case on how a nonprofit organization brought clarity to salary trends, budgeting, and workforce costs using Power BI.
The Client
The client is a nonprofit organization focused on supporting underserved communities through a combination of education, spiritual care, and long-term development initiatives. With deep roots in Kenya, their work spans across children’s welfare, family, and community empowerment, guided by faith-based values. Over the years, the organization has grown through consistent mission-driven efforts and partnerships that aim to break the cycle of poverty.
Challenges Faced by the Client
For any large NGO, tracking employee payroll against the planned budget is a critical part of HR strategy and long-term financial planning. It helps leadership monitor spending, assess workforce costs, and make informed decisions around hiring, appraisals, and role restructuring. However, in this client’s case, while payroll processes were in place, the organization lacked a system that connected budgeting, payout trends, and employee-level visibility into one cohesive view:
- No View of Budget Utilization: Although a monthly payroll budget was allocated, the organization could not track how much was spent versus retained.
- No Month-over-Month Comparison of Payouts: There was no structured way to compare salary variations with the previous month, whether an employee received more, less, or the same, limiting oversight into changes.
- Lack of Visual Insights into Payroll Data: All salary-related data, including allowances, deductions, savings, and loans, were stored but not analyzed or visualized, making reporting and decision-making difficult.
Solutions
To solve these challenges, we built a data-driven payroll analytics system using Microsoft Power BI and Azure SQL. The goal was to convert raw payroll inputs into clear, visual insights that could support better decision-making across all locations:
- Built Visual Dashboards for Payroll Data: We developed interactive Power BI dashboards that pulled data directly from the organization’s web app and displayed it as charts, tables, and summaries in real-time. This made it easier to read and analyze salary data at a glance.
- Enabled Filters by Location, Department, and Year: The dashboards were built with filters for company, center, designation, and year, allowing HR teams to drill down into specific employee groups and compare payroll changes over time.
- Tracked Net Pay vs Gross Pay: The solution visually compared Gross Pay against Net Pay across employee types, providing a clear view of deductions, benefits, and overall payouts in each cycle.
- Added Detailed Breakdown of Payout Components: Key payroll elements like savings, loans (with interest), allowances, ad-hoc salary advances, and employee fund contributions were tracked in detail, making it easy to understand the full salary structure.
- Included Employee Category Insights: Employee types such as Total, Probation, Active, and Inactive, were visualized separately, giving HR a better view of workforce dynamics and associated payroll costs.
- Mapped Monthly Variations Across Employees: The system calculated pay variations from one month to another and highlighted them, helping the team track appraisal impacts, salary revisions, and any anomalies in payout.
- Extended the Solution to Multiple Countries: Though based on Kenya’s HR structure, the solution was designed to work for the client’s operations in Liberia and Ethiopia as well, ensuring consistency across regions.
Solutions Benefits
By turning disconnected payroll data into structured visuals, the client was finally able to understand where their money was going and how it changed over time. The following benefits stood out after the solution went live:
- Centralized Payroll Intelligence Across the Organization: The client has a single view of payroll data across all departments, locations, and entities, making reporting and performance tracking easier at the organizational level.
- Reduced Dependence on Manual Calculations and Spreadsheets: The teams no longer need to compile data manually for salary reviews or budget planning, eliminating errors and saving considerable time during monthly reviews.
- Better Alignment with HR and Compliance Policies: With salary components and employee statuses clearly categorized, the system helps HR teams ensure payouts are aligned with local employment policies and internal pay structures.
- Improved Transparency Across Functions: Both HR and finance teams can now access the same structured view of payroll data, reduce internal misalignment and improving coordination between departments.
Conclusion
With Power BI capabilities, the client now has a live, visual system to track payroll trends, budget usage, and payout variations across countries. The dashboards offer clear insights without manual effort, helping both HR and finance teams make prompt and smart decisions. UB Technology Innovations, Inc. continues to help NGO, charity firms, and social work groups turn data into practical, scalable visualizations.
About Us
UB Technology Innovations, Inc. (UBTI) is a leading global technology solution provider with over 3 decades of experience across all industries, specializing in Capital Markets, Logistics, and Healthcare. We are the preferred Microsoft Solutions Partner backed by a world-class team of Microsoft Certified experts with rich experience in Azure Cloud Platform and Data Analytics.
Winner of the prestigious Azure
Synapse Hackathon 2021 award
One of the Top 10 winners of the
Microsoft’s Azure AI & ML Workathon