How to query your Kantata data from Power BI

Kantata is a sophisticated and comprehensive cloud-based platform. For many, the built-in reports and analysis that Kantata offers is enough for our day-to-day needs. However, if you need something a little more customized, you need to aggregate your data over multiple Kantata accounts, or you need to cross-reference your Kantata data with other cloud services, then you’re going to have to build it yourself. And what better way than using the tool you’re already familiar with - Power BI.

In this article, I’ll take you through the steps to connect Power BI to your Kantata data, and get started customizing the reports you need.

Connect to Kantata

If you don’t already have a SyncHub account, you can grab a free trial here - go on, I’ll wait - it only takes a minute and you can cancel as soon as you’ve finished this tutorial if you like.

Ready? Now, a quick reminder - SyncHub works by staging your Kantata data in a relational database. This gives us a huge advantage over other connectors which query the Kantata API directly, but I won’t go in to them here. The point is, once you have connected your Kantata account, querying from Power BI is trivial as you are just using its native SQL Server Connector.

Once connected, you'll find data from all these endpoints streaming down from Kantata, such as this example from the table:

After connecting, visit your SyncHub Dashboard and grab your new database credentials - you'll need them below.

Reading your Kantata data from Power BI

We now just need to tell Power BI where to find your data. Either select Import data from SQL Server or a new SQL Server connection from the Data ribbon:

When prompted, enter the Server and Database that SyncHub provided in the first step above:

Next - and this is the part that trips most people up - switch to the Database credentials tab (highlighted by the arrow below), then enter the username and password provided to you by SyncHub in the step above:

Troubleshooting

This is the point where you are most likely to run into issues - your login won’t be accepted. After triple-checking that you have used the correct server/database/username/password, the most common resolutions we see are:

1. try opening Power BI in Administrator mode
2. if you are in an office, perhaps you have some firewall restrictions?

All going well, you’ll now be presented with the tables from Kantata, and you know what to do from here:

Keeping your data up-to-date

SyncHub updates it’s staged data from Kantata in near-realtime, so it’s always available. However, depending on your Power BI settings you may still observe a delay with your reports. But not to worry - the solution isn’t too onerous. Every time you want to refresh your data, simply click the (appropriately named) Refresh button in your Ribbon: