Data Analytics and BI (Business Intelligence) tools that help organizations make effective data-driven decisions are growing immensely in the market today. Power BI is one such BI (Business Intelligence) tool that helps companies leverage their customer data and build compelling reports and dashboards. This tool helps organizations carry out an informative analysis of their business & customer data and gain actionable insights.
Understanding a company’s finances and making business decisions become an essential part to grow a successful business. Companies generally use QuickBooks Power BI together to get deeper insights into how their business is performing.
QuickBooks Online is accounting software that helps businesses handle their finances and resources on time. QuickBooks Power BI Integration is a new process that helps businesses utilize the features and capabilities of both platforms optimally. By setting up QuickBooks Power BI Integration, you can visualize all your customer and financial transactions regularly and make strategic decisions from them.
In this article, you will learn how to set up QuickBooks Power BI Integration. You will also get an overview of both Power BI and QuickBooks Online to better understand these technologies individually. Read along to find out how you can integrate QuickBooks and Power BI for your business.
Table of Contents
Prerequisites
- A QuickBooks Online Account.
- Access to the QuickBooks Online connector that uses the QuickBooks ODBC Driver.
- Working knowledge of Power BI.
- Working knowledge of Databases and Data Warehouses.
What is QuickBooks Online?
QuickBooks Online is an accounting software that is developed and maintained by Intuit. It was initially released in 1983 in its beta version and was officially released on Windows platforms in 2019. QuickBooks Online primarily focuses on small and medium-sized companies by offering On-premise and Cloud-based accounting applications.
QuickBooks Online has many capabilities including accepting Business Payments, Managing and Paying bills, and Payroll functionality.
QuickBooks Online has helped organizations keep track of their budget, handle their financial transactions and make the organization more data-driven while ensuring flexibility, security, and reliability in all their processes.
Key Features of QuickBooks Online
QuickBooks Online houses a wide range of features which makes it a better choice as compared to other accounting software. Some of these are as follows:
- QuickBooks Online stores the details of an unlimited number of customers and suppliers.
- It tracks all your Sales & Expenses and helps you understand how your business is performing so that you can make strategic decisions.
- It helps design and create professional invoices, print or send them via email. It also helps you track who owes you money and whether or not you have been paid.
- It is specially designed for Indian businesses as it helps you calculate Service Tax and VAT (Value Added Tax).
- It also enables you to create professional-looking quotes and proposals for your customers and is compatible with all international currencies.
- QuickBooks Online is completely web-based and hence, you don’t have to install or download traditional software or worry about Operating System compatibility. You can simply launch your web browser and use it.
With Quickbooks Power BI Integration, you can use the flexible accounting features of QuickBooks and the visualization abilities of Power BI, all in one package.
Click this link to learn more about QuickBooks Online.
What is Power BI?
Power BI is a Business Intelligence tool from Microsoft. It helps users analyze data from various sources and build reports & dashboards. It can act as a stand-alone desktop application or as a completely managed Cloud-Based web service. While the Power BI Desktop comes as a free application, the Power BI Service is a paid offering based on subscriptions.
Microsoft also offers Power BI Mobile for people who want to keep an eye on their data on the move. Power BI also supports Analytical capabilities that can be embedded into custom web applications. It integrates seamlessly with most of the enterprise Microsoft offerings.
Power BI leverages the ability to connect with the most common databases that exist outside the Microsoft ecosystem and generate simple and interactive dashboards from them.
Key Features of Power BI
Power BI has a wide range of features that makes it a better choice than other BI tools. Some of these features are as follows:
- It provides a wide range of attractive visualization templates to choose from. You can create reports and dashboards using as simple or as complex visualizations as you want to represent your dataset.
- Power BI has a feature called “Get Data” that allows you to select a range of data sources anywhere from On-Premise to Cloud-Based, Unstructured to Structured, and many more. New data sources are updated every month.
- Power BI enables you to filter your datasets to focus on smaller datasets first. This enables you to pay attention to individual data in the dataset rather than the complete dataset at once.
- It allows you to customize your dashboards using a variety of visualization elements. The dashboards are shareable and printable.
- Power BI offers content packs that contain Dashboards, Data Models, Datasets, Embedded Queries, and many more. You can directly use the elements in the content packs instead of looking for the elements separately.
With QuickBooks Power BI Integration, you can visualize your data effectively and monitor it regularly on the go.
Click this link to learn more about Microsoft Power BI.
Method 1: Manual QuickBooks Power BI Integration
This method involves using the QuickBooks Power BI Online connector to connect your QuickBooks Online account along with its data to view, analyze and report it on Power BI.
Method 2: Using Hevo Data to Set up QuickBooks Power BI Integration
Hevo Data provides a hassle-free solution and helps you directly transfer data from QuickBooks Online to Power BI and numerous other BI tools without any intervention in an effortless manner. Hevo is fully managed and completely automates the process of not only loading data from your desired source but also enriching the data and transforming it into an analysis-ready form without having to write a single line of code.
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Hevo’s pre-built integration with QuickBooks Online along with 100+ other data sources will take full charge of the data transfer process, allowing you to focus on key business activities.
Methods to Set up QuickBooks Power BI Integration
Now, that you have a basic understanding of QuickBooks and Power BI, let’s discuss how you can perform QuickBooks Online Data Analysis with Power BI. There are 2 methods you can use to set up QuickBooks Power BI Integration to analyze QuickBooks Online data with Power BI:
Method 1: Manual QuickBooks Power BI Integration
In this method, you use the QuickBooks Power BI Online Connector to connect your QuickBooks Online account so that you can view, analyze and report your company data on Power BI. The QuickBooks Online Connector leverages the QuickBooks ODBC Driver, which is shipped along with Power BI Desktop.
To do this, you need to have a QuickBooks Online account, username, and password. Your account must also support the Import functionality. Once you have done all this, you can follow the steps given below:
Step 1: Connect to your QuickBooks Online Account
To connect with QuickBooks Online, go to the Get Data Dialog Box and search for QuickBooks in the Search box, and select QuickBooks Online (Beta) from the product-specific data connector list and click on Connect. This is shown below.
Select Continue in the Preview Connector message.
Step 2: Sign in to your QuickBooks Online Account
Select the Sign In option to log in to your QuickBooks Account and enter your QuickBooks credentials. In some cases, you will need to perform 2FA (2 Factor Authentication) as well. This is shown below.
Step 3: Choose your Company to set up Power BI
Select your company in the next dialog box and click on Next as shown below.
Step 4: Connect your QuickBooks Online Account and Power BI
Once you have successfully signed in, click on Connect to connect your QuickBooks account with Power BI as shown below.
Step 5: Select the Tables you want to Load or Transform on Power BI
Once you have successfully established a connection with Power BI, navigate to the Navigator Dialog Box and select the QuickBooks Tables you want to load or transform as shown below.
That’s it! You have successfully set up QuickBooks Power BI Integration using the manual method!
Some of the Limitations of this Method include:
- You must have a QuickBooks Online account to use this method.
- You cannot use this method if your company is not listed on the QuickBooks Company page.
- In case your QuickBooks Online account does not have an Import capability, you cannot use this method.
To overcome these limitations and integrate QuickBooks Online and Power BI quickly and efficiently, you can use Hevo’s No-code Data Pipelines. Check out the next method to understand how Hevo can help you integrate them within minutes.
Method 2: Using Hevo Data to Set Up QuickBooks Power BI Integration
Hevo Data, a No-code Data Pipeline helps you directly transfer data from QuickBooks and 100+ other data sources to Business Intelligence tools such as Power BI, Data Warehouses, or a destination of your choice in a completely hassle-free & automated manner. Hevo is fully managed and completely automates the process of not only loading data from your desired source but also enriching the data and transforming it into an analysis-ready form without having to write a single line of code. Its fault-tolerant architecture ensures that the data is handled in a secure, consistent manner with zero data loss.
Hevo takes care of all your data preprocessing needs and lets you focus on key business activities and draw a much powerful insight on how to generate more leads, retain customers, and take your business to new heights of profitability. It provides a consistent & reliable solution to manage data in real-time and always have analysis-ready data in your desired destination. Moreover, Hevo makes it easier to analyze QuickBooks Online data with Power BI.
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Hevo focuses on three simple steps to set up QuickBooks Power BI Integration:
- Extract: Connect Hevo with QuickBooks Online and various other data sources by simply logging in with your credentials and extract information seamlessly.
- Integrate: Consolidate your data from several sources in Hevo’s Managed Data Warehouse Platform and automatically transform it into an analysis-ready form.
- Visualize: Connect Hevo with your desired BI tool such as Power BI and easily visualize your data to gain better insights.
Check out what makes Hevo amazing:
- Secure: Hevo has a fault-tolerant architecture that ensures that the data is handled in a secure, consistent manner with zero data loss.
- Schema Management: Hevo takes away the tedious task of schema management & automatically detects the schema of incoming data and maps it to the destination schema.
- Minimal Learning: Hevo, with its simple and interactive UI, is extremely simple for new customers to work on and perform operations.
- Hevo Is Built To Scale: As the number of sources and the volume of your data grows, Hevo scales horizontally, handling millions of records per minute with very little latency.
- Incremental Data Load: Hevo allows the transfer of data that has been modified in real-time. This ensures efficient utilization of bandwidth on both ends.
- Live Support: The Hevo team is available round the clock to extend exceptional support to its customers through chat, email, and support calls.
- Live Monitoring: Hevo allows you to monitor the data flow and check where your data is at a particular point in time.
Conclusion
This article gave you a step-by-step guide on setting up QuickBooks Power BI Integration. It also gave you an overview of both QuickBooks Online and Power BI along with their features. In addition, QuickBooks Online Data Analysis with Power BI will help your company to generate insights that will aid in your business growth.
Overall, QuickBooks Power BI Integration can be set up using either the manual method or by using Hevo, but if time and ease of use are a parameter for you, using automated data platforms like Hevo help you to set up QuickBooks Power BI Integration seamlessly!
In case you want to integrate data from data sources like QuickBooks into your desired Database/destination and seamlessly visualize it in a BI tool of your choice such as Power BI, then Hevo Data is the right choice for you! It will help simplify the ETL and management process of both the data sources and destinations.
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Share your experience of setting up QuickBooks Power BI Integration in the comments section below!
Aakash is a research enthusiast who was involved with multiple teaming bootcamps including Web Application Pen Testing, Network and OS Forensics, Threat Intelligence, Cyber Range and Malware Analysis/Reverse Engineering. His passion to the field drives him to create in-depth technical articles related to data industry.