Need a dashboard you can share with a link, without paying for BI licences? Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio) is free, runs in the browser and makes it easy to share interactive reports with your team or clients. In this article we'll connect it to a live copy of your Xero data using its built-in SQL Server connector - no exports, no third-party plugins, and reports that keep themselves up to date.
In this article, I’ll take you through the steps to connect Looker Studio to your Xero 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 Xero data in a relational database. This gives us a huge advantage over other connectors which query the Xero API directly, but I won’t go in to them here. The point is, once you have connected your Xero account, querying from Google Data Studio 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, then proceed back to this article
Reading your Xero data from Google Data Studio
We now just need to tell Google Data Studio where to find your data, and for this we use the built-in SQL Server connector - easy! Hit the Add Data button, then search for “SQL Server”:
Now, plug in the credentials which you downloaded from SyncHub earlier:
Once authenticated, you can write a custom query to extract just the view you need. For example, this SQL grabs the top few records from your Account table:
select [Code], [Name], [Type]
from schema_xero_1.Account
Keeping your data up-to-date
SyncHub updates it’s staged data from Xero in near-realtime, so it’s always available. However, Google Data Studio offers it’s own cache which may have a different refresh setting. To adjust the freshness of your data, remember to Edit your connection and then the Data Freshness value:
Beyond Xero
Xero-specific reports are essential, but the true power of SyncHub comes when you augment your Xero data with additional information:
- SyncHub allows you to pull in data from multiple Xero accounts, and compare/report/aggregate from within the same Google Data Studio report. See this blog article for details on aggregating your Xero 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 Xero data and taking your first steps towards a data-driven business.