simPRO is a sophisticated and comprehensive cloud-based platform. For many, the built-in reports and analysis that simPRO 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 simPRO accounts, or you need to cross-reference your simPRO 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 simPRO data, and get started customizing the reports you need.
First - grab your SyncHub Credentials
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 simPRO data in a relational database. This gives us a huge advantage over other connectors which query the simPRO API directly, but I won’t go in to them here. The point is, once you have connected your simPRO account, querying from Power BI is trivial as you are just using its native SQL Server Connector.
So, once you’re connected, go to your SyncHub Dashboard and grab your new database credentials - you'll need them below.
Reading your simPRO 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:
- try opening Power BI in Administrator mode
- if you are in an office, perhaps you have some firewall restrictions?
All going well, you’ll now be presented with the tables from simPRO, and you know what to do from here:
Keeping your data up-to-date
SyncHub updates it’s staged data from simPRO 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:
Beyond simPRO
simPRO-specific reports are essential, but the true power of SyncHub comes when you augment your simPRO data with additional information:
- SyncHub allows you to pull in data from multiple simPRO accounts, and compare/report/aggregate from within the same report. See this blog article for details on aggregating your simPRO data.
- Most businesses use multiple cloud platforms. SyncHub provides connectors to a wide range of popular cloud platforms. Imagine the insights you could gather by consolidating this information into a single dashboard (or see this case study for real-world examples).
So what are you waiting for? Grab a free trial of SyncHub here and see what you can do. In ten minutes from now, you could be reporting against your simPRO data and taking your first steps towards a data-driven business.