Power BI

Power BI is one of the most powerful business intelligence tools out there, allowing you to pull vast amounts of information from a wide variety of sources, and turning it into advanced visualizations. Accelo’s Power BI integration works to take advantage of that powerful visualization technology, pulling your Accelo account’s full range of data on upcoming and ongoing work into that BI system.

Contents

• Supported Versions
• Data Model
• Accessing Accelo Through Power BI
• Accelo's Built-In Reports
• Creating Custom Reports Using Your Accelo Data
• Data Refreshing in Power BI
• Connect your datasets to Power BI Desktop

Supported Versions

Accelo’s Power BI integration works with all versions of the cloud-based, Office 365 edition of Power BI, including:

• Power BI Pro (Cloud Edition)
• Power BI Premium (Cloud Edition)

To use Accelo’s Power BI integration, you need to have a valid Office 365 account.  Accelo does not integrate with the desktop edition of Power BI. 

Further details on Power BI's licensing can be found at https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/

Data Model

Power BI’s data model utilizes database tables to organize data on a single topic from multiple objects in Accelo. In this model, the object (i.e. a Job) is represented as a row in the table, with each column identifying a different detail from the job’s title to its due date and manager. The table includes a separate row for each Job in your Accelo account, with additional columns being used to track additional details. Because this information is pulled directly from your Accelo account, information is divided into separate tables based on how it’s stored in Accelo.  For example:

Job Information

Activities

Because this information is pulled directly from your Accelo account, some of that information will be displayed in a raw, database format.  Date and time amounts will be especially affected by this, being present in epoch/unix time and seconds.  As a result, many tables in Accelo will have two entries for dates and times included in them - the raw value from your Accelo account, and the formatted value for use in your reports, i.e. “Date Created (Unix)” and “Date Created”.

NOTE: Accelo no longer pulls Subject or Body information for Activities. This was done due to the fact that removing this pull improves the speed of the sync process, allowing more useful datapoints to be pulled through.

To begin creating your own, customized reports in Power BI, you’ll be adding columns from the Accelo app's dataset to visualizations in Power BI.

Accessing Accelo Through Power BI

To access Accelo’s Power BI integration, follow these easy steps to add the Accelo app to your Power BI account:

1. Access Power BI by clicking here.

2. Next, you'll see a prompt  asking "Install this Power BI app?" Click Install.
   
   

3. Once Installed, you'll see the latest version of the Accelo application on your Apps page. Click on that version's tile to begin connecting.
   
   
   

4. You'll be presented with three options.  Choose Connect your data.
   
   
   

5. You’ll then be prompted to enter your Accelo URL.  Your URL is the same URL which you log in to Accelo from, with the addition of “.api.”  For example, if your Accelo account was located at https://acme.accelo.com you would log in to Power BI using the URL https://acme.api.accelo.com.
   
   
   It is important to enter the full URL, including the “https://” prefix.  Excluding this prefix or ".api" from the URL will result in an error.
   
   

6. You’ll be prompted to confirm the login method; there are no options to be changed here.  Simply click Sign In.
   
   

7. You’ll then see a popup with your Accelo account’s login page.  Log in to your Accelo account as you would normally log in (via Google, Microsoft, etc.)
   

When the app is first added, Power BI will begin downloading your entire Accelo account’s history.  This process can require up to an hour to complete, and there will not be a loading bar shown during this time.  Until the import has completed, Power BI will present you with example data when loading reports.

Accelo’s Built-In Reports

Accelo’s Power BI integration comes complete with several built-in reports, including:

• Sales Pipeline: Offers a breakdown of your current sales by stage, including the total possible and weighted value differentiation

• Sales Forecast: Identifies expected sales revenue from by month, based on sales' due date and weighted value

• Won Sales: Tracks the statistics of sales which have been won by salesperson and type

• Lost Sales: Tracks the statistics of sales which have been lost by salesperson and type

• Billing Revenue: Track billed and outstanding revenue by client, type of work and time period.

• Project Budget Monitor: Monitor your projects' service and material budgets.

• Timesheet Report: Review your team's time entries by person, billing rate, billed status, type of work and date.

• Open Tickets: Monitor your open tickets to target important and outstanding tickets.

• Open Tasks: Track your team's open tasks by due date, assignee, work type and budget.

Creating Custom Reports Using Your Accelo Data

One of the most powerful aspects of the Power BI integration is the ability to create your own, customized reports based on the data that’s pulled from your Accelo account.  To begin creating a custom report of your own, follow these steps:

1. If you haven't already, add the Accelo app to your Power BI account.
2. Open the workspace that you added the Accelo app to, and choose the Accelo Dataset
   

3. You’ll now be presented with your Accelo account’s full array of data, organized by module table, on the right.  Under each table, you can find the individual fields which are available for that module. 
   
   To visualize your data, simply click a visualization icon,  then begin dragging fields from the FIELDS list into the visualization's variables.
   
   

Data Refreshing in Power BI

Typically, Power BI will refresh the data within the available datasets every 24 hours. However, a user can cause a manual data refresh via the Datasets tab.

To manually refresh a dataset:

1. In Power BI, navigate to the workspace where the dataset resides.

2. Once in the workspace, click the Datasets tab.

3. Click the Refresh now icon to trigger a manual refresh of the data.

   
   

Connect your datasets to Power BI Desktop

NOTE: Power BI desktop is only available on Windows.

Once your workspace is set up in Power BI, you can connect its data to your Power BI Desktop application, allowing you to build new reports based on your datasets or copy existing reports to manipulate data. 

To connect your workspace to Power BI Desktop:

1. Once Power BI Desktop is installed and opened, navigate to the Get Data button in the External data section of the top toolbar.
   
   

2. On the Get Data modal window that appears, select the Power BI option, then Power BI datasets. Next, click the yellow Connect button.
   
   

3. On the following modal, select the dataset you would like to connect. Once selected, click Create.

   

Interested in learning more about how to use Power BI? Check out Microsoft's guided learning tutorials and sample dashboards and reports