Don’t Worry, Your Eyes Aren’t Tricking You. You Read the Title Correctly!
A long-standing functionality gap, the inability to publish Power BI reports in Acumatica has plagued users of earlier versions (pre-Acumatica 6.0).
While working with one of our Acumatica clients, Tourism Vancouver, we were able to find a workaround to this issue. In this blog, we will explain our approach and point you to step-by-step instructions for using it yourself!
Our Power BI with Acumatica Approach
The way we saw it, there were two possibilities that would enable the users at Tourism Vancouver to view Power BI reports in their Acumatica 5.2 system.
- Give all users access to PowerBI
- Publish the Reports
While the first option was certainly simple, it would lead to inefficiencies as it would make it necessary for users to login to two separate systems. The second possibility was more promising, but what was the best approach to do this? We discovered it was by publishing the Power BI reports via Wiki Pages within Acumatica.
Note: This approach assumes that you have channeled your data from Acumatica into Power BI.
Step-by-Step Instructions for Publishing Power BI Reports in Acumatica (pre-version 6.0)
Our approach is pretty simple. Once you have created a report in Power BI all you need to do:
- Publish it to the web.
- Generate an embed code.
- Paste embed code into a new wiki article in Acumatica.
- Hit Publish and you are ready to go!
For step-by-step instructions, download your detailed PDF here!
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A Word to the Wise
This is certainly a great workaround for people looking to view Power BI reports within older versions of Acumatica. However, like anything it has its positive and negative aspects.
Pros:
- Efficiency: By enabling users to work within a centralized system, this approach facilities efficiency. For people who spend a lot of time in Acumatica it’s a huge bonus as they no longer need to switch between systems!
- Accessibility: Power BI is pretty inexpensive, making it accessible and cost-efficient for even the smallest of businesses.
- Flexibility: This approach works even if your data is coming from systems other than Acumatica. It’s very easy to include data from a number of sources in your reports.
- Security: Sitemaps can be created to assign different levels of security to different users.
Cons:
- Data Sensitivity: Because users can share the URL of the report with anyone they chose, it’s prudent not to include any sensitive data – such as Competitive Advantage Data – in the reports published in Acumatica via this approach.
While not necessarily a con, it’s worth mentioning that this work-around becomes obsolete in Acumatica 6.0. This version supports the publication of Power BI reports. Another reason to consider an upgrade to Acumatica 6.0!
Publishing Power BI Reports in Acumatica: What do you think?
While we think this is a pretty good solution, we’d love to hear your thoughts on it. Leave a comment below or get in touch with us via telephone or email!
Don’t forget your step-by-step instructions on how-to publish Power BI reports in Accumatica (pre-version 6.0) – download your instructions here!
For more information on Acumatica or Power BI, check out these resources:
