Overview
BQE CORE allows you to integrate with Microsoft Power BI. Power BI is a business intelligence service by Microsoft wherein you can track your business analytics and create reports and dashboards on it. It is a powerful tool that connects your various data sources and turns them into meaningful, centralized, visual and interactive insights for your business. You can download Microsoft Power BI Desktop from the Power BI Downloads page and then install it on your computer. Click here to watch a video on integrating with Microsoft Power BI.
To get your CORE data into Power BI, you need to use the BQE CORE connector, which is powered by BQE CORE Public APIs. The Power BI connector is available directly through the Microsoft Power BI app. Using this connector, you can ingest available CORE data through the CORE APIs into the Power BI application to generate graphs and reports outside of CORE. This connector gives you the ability to seamlessly import your raw CORE data into the Power BI application, as well as transform it into meaningful, centralized, visual and interactive insights for your business. Check out the Power BI Documentation by Microsoft for details and visit the Power BI Forum to learn more about this powerful connector.
Notes
- Although the connector is powered by CORE Public APIs, it does not give you access to all the models and properties (i.e., fields) available through our APIs. However, most of them are available, and more models and properties will be available in the future. Also note that not all fields that you see through the CORE web app are available through our APIs or the Power BI connector.
Check out the API models and properties that are not available through the connector at present.- Deleted History model
- companyId property in Company model
- resourceGroup and resourceGroupId properties in Allocation model
- sendInvoiceToContact property in Project model
- When loading TimeEntry data, the connector only retrieves the entries of the last one month if you do not provide an explicit Date value in the Where parameter. You need to provide a date range in the Where parameter if you want to retrieve the entries of dates other than the last one month. For example, use date > '2025-01-01' if you want to retrieve entries from the beginning of the year 2025. Check CORE Help Center for more details.
How To
Connect Power BI with BQE CORE
Connect Power BI with BQE CORE
To connect CORE and Microsoft Power BI, watch this video or follow these steps:
- Open the Microsoft Power BI Desktop app.
- Browse to the File tab > Get data and click Get data to get started to launch the Get Data dialog.
- Select All or Other on the left and look for BQE CORE in the list. If you cannot find BQE CORE, check to make sure you are on the latest version of Power BI.
- Click Connect. You are prompted to connect to a third-party service; click Continue.
- On the BQE CORE > CORE Login dialog, click Sign in.
- You will be prompted to log into CORE.
- On the Log In screen, enter your CORE Email and Password. Click Login. The BQE CORE connector remembers your credentials in the future.
- You are prompted to select your CORE company file. Click Grant Permission.
- Next, click Connect on the dialog. This opens the Navigator screen where you can access your CORE data.
Get Data from BQE CORE
After you have connected CORE and Microsoft Power BI, the Navigator screen opens up. To start using this feature, you need to get the data from CORE into Power BI.
To do so, watch this video or follow these steps:
- On the Navigator screen, select a CORE feature on the left (say TimeEntry). You can also click on a feature name to preview its data, provided Enable data previews is selected under Display Options. This loads the model data from your CORE database into a table.
- On the right panel, apply the Where and Expand parameters, if needed. These work exactly like the parameters supported by CORE APIs. You can also use operators with them. The Where parameter allows you to retrieve a subset of the data based on a condition (e.g., costRate=100) and the Expand parameter allows you to retrieve nested properties in the model (e.g., address in the Employee model or invoiceDetails in the Invoice model). Check CORE API Documentation for more details.
- Additionally, you can use the APIPageSize parameter to control the number of records to be retrieved by the connector in each API call it makes to our Public APIs. The value can be set between 100 and 1000. If you do not specify a value, the connector defaults to 1000, unless the Expand parameter is used, in which case the maximum allowed value is 100. Adjusting the page size allows you to optimize the connector performance by giving you more control over data loads, particularly when dealing with large datasets.
- Click Load to load the data into Power BI. Alternatively, click Transform to modify the data in Power BI.
You can now use the data to build your own reports and dashboards. Check out the Power BI Documentation by Microsoft for details.