Data Analytics & BI Consulting · Greater Seattle

Turn scattered data into dashboards you can act on.

Cedarwood Insights helps small businesses replace manual spreadsheets with clear, automated dashboards and reporting — so you spend less time wrangling data and more time deciding what to do with it.

Experience
5+ years
Education
M.S. Analytics
Records analyzed
Millions+
Languages
EN / 中文
What I do

Practical analytics, built for how small teams actually work.

No oversized platforms or jargon. Just the reports and dashboards that answer the questions you ask every week.

01

Automated dashboards

Interactive Tableau and Power BI dashboards that refresh on their own — sales, refunds, KPIs, and operations in one place, filterable by region, product, or period.

02

KPI & financial reporting

Turn manual monthly reports into repeatable templates. In past projects this cut reporting time by around a third and reduced errors.

03

Data cleaning & ETL

Pull data from several messy sources, clean and combine it with SQL and Python, and build a reliable foundation you can trust for analysis.

Selected projects

A look at the kind of work I do.

Each project moved from raw, multi-source data to dashboards and findings a non-technical audience could act on.

Retail · Customer behavior

Retail sales & member behavior analysis

Tableau · SQL · Python
Challenge
Sales and refund data lived across five disconnected sources, and monthly reporting was slow and manual.
Approach
Built data pipelines to process 832K+ records and designed interactive dashboards for purchasing patterns, peak periods, and refund behavior.
Result
Automated the KPI reporting templates — cutting manual reporting time by ~35% — and surfaced high-refund segments and one-time buyers.
Real estate · Prediction

Housing price fairness & prediction

SQL · Python · R · Tableau
Challenge
Understand what really drives housing prices and whether pricing was fair across a large, varied market.
Approach
Designed ETL workflows over 1.6M+ housing records and compared clustering, regression, decision-tree, and SVM models.
Result
Delivered dashboards and written summaries that explained pricing patterns and key drivers to a non-technical audience.
Big data · Modeling

Music streaming trends & popularity

PySpark · Python · Tableau
Challenge
Find what audio features relate to a track's popularity across a very large catalog.
Approach
Processed 1M+ tracks with PySpark and applied K-means clustering and a Random Forest model to study listener patterns.
Result
Translated the analysis into clear visualizations and summaries that made the findings easy to act on.
About

Hi, I'm Linda Zhao.

I started Cedarwood Insights to help small businesses get the same kind of clear, decision-ready reporting that larger companies take for granted — without the overhead.

I bring 5+ years of finance and data analysis experience together with a Master's in Analytics, so I understand both the numbers and the business behind them. I'm comfortable working with English- and Mandarin-speaking teams, and I care most about delivering work you can actually use.

Focus
Dashboards, reporting automation, data cleaning
Tools
Tableau, Power BI, SQL, Python, R, Excel
Background
M.S. Analytics · 5+ yrs finance / data
Languages
English · 中文 (Mandarin)
Based in
Greater Seattle, WA
Get in touch

Have data that's harder to read
than it should be?

Tell me what you're trying to figure out. I'll suggest a simple first step — often a single dashboard or report to start.

Email me
guilin238@gmail.com in LinkedIn ◎ Greater Seattle, WA