Power BI reporting

Microsoft Power BI is a suite of business-analytics tools for exploring your data and sharing insights. Once connected to BUZ, you can build rich, interactive dashboards that refresh on demand.

BUZ exposes its reporting data through an OData feed, the same feed Power BI connects to. Each report in the feed (SalesReport, leads, jobs, and so on) becomes a table you can load and visualise.

Before you start — your organisation code

You need your five-character BUZ organisation code before Power BI can authenticate against the feed. Find it in BUZ under Reports (shown on the right-hand side, e.g. BUZDM). If your organisation has never used the OData feed, contact BUZ Support to have the feed enabled for you.

Your OData username is your organisation code, a forward slash, then your BUZ username (usually your email address) — for example BUZDM/you@example.com. Your password is your normal BUZ password.

Install Power BI Desktop (Windows)

Download Power BI Desktop from powerbi.microsoft.com/downloads and follow the installer prompts. It runs as a desktop application.
Launch Power BI Desktop and sign in with (or create) a Microsoft account.

Connect to your BUZ data

In Power BI Desktop, choose Get Data.
Select Other → OData Feed, then Connect.
Enter the feed URL: https://api.buzmanager.com/reports
Choose Basic authentication and sign in with your OData credentials (organisation code / username and BUZ password, as described above).
Select the report you want — for example SalesReport — and choose Transform Data (Edit) to open the Query Editor.
In the Query Editor, keep the columns and rows you need: remove unwanted columns and apply filters. Filtering by Invoice date or Accepted date is recommended so you only pull the period you care about.
Choose Close & Apply to load the shaped data into your model.

Build a report

Power BI Desktop has three views along the left edge — Report, Data, and Relationships. In Report view, the loaded fields appear on the right; drag the fields you want onto the canvas in the order you want them displayed.

A typical sales layout might use: OrderNo, Customer, Dispatch_Suburb, Dispatch_Post_Code, Order_Amount_ExTax, Order_Amount_IncTax, Workflow_Dispatch_Status, Workflow_Job_Tracking_Status, and Order_status.

Power BI automatically sums numeric fields (shown with a Σ before the field name). To stop it summarising a column, open the field’s dropdown under Values and choose Don’t summarize.

To visualise the data, pick a chart type from the Visualizations pane — column, bar, line, pie, table, and so on.

Add a calculated column (DAX)

For more specific reporting you can add columns that combine or calculate values: go to Modeling → New Column and enter a DAX formula. For example, an order total per order number:

TotalAmt = CALCULATE(SUM([Order_Amount_IncTax]), FILTER('SalesReport', [OrderNo] = EARLIER([OrderNo])))

CALCULATE evaluates an expression under the given filter.
SUM([Order_Amount_IncTax]) totals the tax-inclusive amount.
FILTER('SalesReport', [OrderNo] = EARLIER([OrderNo])) restricts the sum to rows sharing the current row’s order number.

Microsoft’s DAX basics guide is a good reference.

Refresh data

To pull the latest data from BUZ, choose Refresh on the Home tab. Use Transform Data → Edit Queries to change the filters applied to what is downloaded.

Switch to a different organisation

Open your Power BI file.
Go to File → Options and settings → Data source settings.
Select the BUZ data source and choose Edit Permissions.
Choose Edit on the credentials, enter the other organisation’s code / username, and save.
Run Get Data again to pull that organisation’s data.

Power BI on Mac

Power BI has no Mac desktop app. To use it on a Mac, a Windows user first builds and publishes the report, then you open it through Power BI online:

Sign in to (or sign up for) Power BI online.
Choose Files → Local File and select the report file shared with you.
Import the data to view and interact with the report online.

Connect via Excel instead

You can also pull the same OData feed into Excel with Power Query: Data → Get Data → From Other Sources → From OData Feed, then enter https://api.buzmanager.com/reports and sign in with your OData credentials. See Excel reporting with OData for the full walkthrough.