How can we make Power BI reports with XTRF?

It's not an easy run but it can be achived. Do you have the cloud version or on-premise? If on-premise you have to export all data you need through API. I've created a few macros to do that, and a lot of views. I can help you.

You could also create different views, export everything to e. g. BigQuery and import everything from BigQuery to the desired BI-Tool. Export from XTRF can be done once a day or even a few times a day. But that's a paid feature.

We connected XTRF to Spreadsheet with their Ad-On https://xtrf.userecho.com/knowledge-bases/6/articles/708-a-guide-to-xtrf-for-google-sheets-add-on. Essentially you would create a view containing all the data you want to create reports on. 

Depending on your needs, you may have to manipulate the data further in a Spreadsheet. For example, we have a macro running that formats the Start date ( removes EET and time ) + extracts Month and Year. From there you can connect it to any BI. We used first Looker studio; now we are transferring to Power BI. 

The only issue I find with the spreadsheet Ad-On is although it has an Autorefresh button, that should pull automatically and refresh the data from XTRF it is not working. XTRF Team is aware of it, so hopefully, it will be sorted in the near future. 

Hello. Do you have any idea when the issue will be solved?

We connected a smart view to BigQuery via API. It pulls once a day all our Project, Client, Jobs, Invoice, and Vendor data. We then use LookerStudio to generate reports - but any BI tool could work. I used the google spreadsheet add-on a few years ago and found that it worked pretty well. But it wasn't as robust or reliable as connecting XTRF via API to BQ, especially when your data set gets larger.

Thank you all for your replies. I am forwarding this information to my Manager. He and his team are working on Power Bi and will be implementing all these procedures. 

Hello!

Sorry if this is not the correct subject for this post, but how do you see all API transactions that you develop and the new API Call charge?

Hello, 

The last news we have is that XTRF won't be developing anything and won't be fixing any issues related to the Google Sheet add-on from now on.  Are you all using Big Query connector? How is the API calls consumption in that matter?

Thanks in advance for your insights. 

Hi Myriam,

We still use Big Query and LookerStudio. Works well for us. The API call is somewhat heavy because we do a full dump of a number of tables every night. We've been thinking about streamlining it and only sending over new and updated data, but it hasn't been our priority since it's working fine for now.

If you're interested I'd be happy to connect you to the developer we work with who set this up for us.

Mark

Thanks a lot for your reply, Mark. 

Please send me a message to myriam[at]kobaltlanguages.com and we can continue from there :)