What people ask us before the first call.
Cost, timelines, ownership, personal data, and what happens to your team. All answered here rather than held back for a conversation.
What does Acta Data actually do?
We build the data layer a business needs to run on, and then the AI on top of it. Every system you own gets connected and landed in your own Google BigQuery environment as events that are recorded once and never rewritten. On top of that we build the modelled metrics, the board and regulatory reporting, and a Summary Page that shows the whole business against target. Then we wire in Claude so your team can ask their own questions, and put agents onto the repetitive operational work.
How much does it cost?
Four options, priced by how much of the business is in scope. Discovery is a £15k one-off: the value stream map, the AI readiness review, the watch-outs and a build plan you own and can hand to anyone — there is no obligation to use us afterwards — and if you do go ahead with a build, the whole £15k is credited against it. Solving one area, usually operations, is £60k a year, billed monthly at £5k. Mapping the whole business, with safe PII-restricted self-service analytics through Claude, is £120k a year at £10k a month. Enterprise adds autonomous agents and is priced against the outcome it delivers rather than from a list. After the twelve-month build you can walk away, or keep us on for £2k a month on a rolling monthly contract so nothing falls over. For scale, one area a year is less than half a fully-loaded senior data hire at around £143k. Each tier covers a stated number of source systems and legal entities rather than a revenue band, because a large simple business is a cheaper build than a small complex one: Whole business covers one entity, one country, up to 12 source systems, and anything past that — group structures, several countries, more integration — is scoped as Enterprise.
We are a large or multi-entity group — which tier applies?
Enterprise. The published tiers are bounded by scope rather than by turnover: Whole business covers one entity, one country, up to 12 source systems, and One area covers one value stream, up to 6 source systems. Past those limits — several legal entities, more than one country, or more integration than that — it is scoped and priced properly instead of squeezed into a tier. That cuts both ways: a large, structurally simple business often lands inside a published tier, because what drives the cost is the number of systems and the number of people who have to agree a definition, not revenue.
Can we just buy the strategy and build it ourselves?
Yes, and the Discovery tier exists for exactly that. For £15k you get your value streams mapped, the leaks quantified, an honest read on whether your data can support AI yet, the watch-outs, and a prioritised build plan. It is written to be acted on by somebody else — your own team, or another supplier. No proprietary format, no dependency, and nothing held back to protect a follow-on sale. And it is a down payment rather than a sunk cost: if you do come back for the build, the whole £15k comes off it.
How long before we see something?
Within a week. We connect the first source, land the events and put a real number in front of you — not a plan for a number. The layer takes shape over the first month, and the Summary Page and reporting behind it go live in months two and three. There is no six-week discovery phase that produces a document.
Do we own the environment and the data?
Yes. Everything is built in your own Google Cloud project, inside your own secure VPC. You own the environment, the data and the models throughout — we are working in your account, not hosting you in ours. At the end there is a structured handover with everything Terraformed and documented, so you can run it without us.
What happens to personal data?
Personal data is obscured at ingest, so it does not travel into the modelling layer or into any AI prompt. Self-service analytics through Claude is PII-restricted by design. We only ever need read access, with personal data excluded.
Does this replace our data team?
No — it means you do not have to build one before you get value. We work alongside whoever you already have, and the point of the engagement is that your team is self-sufficient well before twelve months. Then we get out of the way and you use us where it actually matters.
What technology do you use, and why that stack?
Google BigQuery for where the data lives, shadcn for what you look at, and Claude for who you ask. It is all Google underneath, in your own secure environment, because that stack scales, integrates with everything and lets us start immediately rather than spending a quarter on procurement and platform choices.
Which sectors do you work in?
We work where operations are complex enough to need a real data function: Consumer Credit, Debt Management, Credit Unions, B2B Services, Wholesale & Distribution, Manufacturing, Omni-channel Retail, Legal Services, Customer Service, Recruitment & Training, SaaS & Startups. The team has held C-suite positions across marketing, operations, technology and product, so the value streams in those sectors are familiar rather than newly researched.
Can you take over an existing BI or reporting setup?
Yes. Taking over reporting somebody else built is one of the most common ways engagements start — usually when the manual reconciliation behind it has become the bottleneck, or when the person who understood the workbooks has left.
What do you mean by a second brain?
A layer that remembers everything the business has done — every activity, every decision, and what happened next — and can be asked about it in real time. For an individual it answers what they would otherwise have to ask the colleague who has been there fifteen years. For the business it means that judgement stops living in a handful of heads: when somebody resigns the reasoning stays behind, and when somebody joins they start with the whole history. Recommendations are generated inside your own policy rather than filtered afterwards, the priors come from decisions your business has actually made rather than from industry averages, and every recommendation is scored against what happened next so the following one is better.
Can you prove our data retention policy is actually being followed?
That is the work. Most retention policies exist as a document and nothing else, because nobody knows which of a dozen systems hold a given record and deleting it from the CRM does nothing about the copy in the warehouse, the reporting database or a spreadsheet on somebody's desktop. We map where personal data actually lives across every connected system, express your retention rules as code against that map, run them on a schedule, and keep an audit trail of what was deleted, when and under which rule. You set the policy — we make it happen and produce the evidence that it did.
Can you support data destruction and right-to-erasure requests?
Yes. An erasure request is the same problem as retention, one record at a time: the difficulty is not deleting, it is knowing everywhere the record exists. Once personal data is mapped across your systems, a request can be actioned once and evidenced across all of them, with a record of what was removed and when. That record is usually what an auditor or the ICO actually asks for.
Our marketing list is old — can you tell which contacts we can lawfully email?
We can show you which contacts have an evidenced lawful basis and which do not. Every contact gets traced back to the event that created it — the form submission, its timestamp and the wording that was on the page at the time — or to nothing at all, which is the common case for anything more than a few years old. The list then splits into contacts you can stand behind and contacts to suppress. The decision about what basis you rely on is yours and your counsel's; we produce the evidence to make it with.
What is the Summary Page?
One page showing the whole business in real time: a balanced scorecard across finance, customer, operations and people with every measure against target and RAG derived from the metric tree rather than typed in, the quarter's objectives tracked against pace, and the three things that most need attention today. Clear one and the next moves up.
Bring one decision your data should be helping you make.
30 minutes, no deck. We'll tell you on the call whether we're the right partner, and exactly what we'd ship in the first 30 days.