What are you using for a Custom Accelo Dashboard?

[Andrew Legrand]

I'm curious to hear what solutions are out there, and I'm likely looking for a consultant to help me set this up.

The Accelo reporting needs to be customized for our business, and exporting to Excel doesn't seem like the best option. The KPIs I want to track CAN be calculated by my data in Accelo, so it's really a matter of exporting and presenting that information (which is probably easier said than done).

I've talked with the folks at DataSights, and they were helpful and professional. Their pricing seemed to be ~$270/mo USD, without any consultation hours, which is a bit steep for my very small 4 person shop. 

What other options are people using?

[Martin Gamble]

We are using Google Data Studio to create our Dashboards. It still involves exporting data to Google Sheets,  but once set-up its a 10-15min task each day. I'm trying to find out what it takes to create a data connector for Accelo to enable live data updates. 

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[David Rudduck]

Have you considered looking at whether PowerBI can do what you need?

Accelo _used_ to work with the free version of PowerBI that's included with Office 365, but it now seems to require the paid version.

Irrespective, quite a bit less than USD$270/month even with a couple of users having access to the dashboards.

[Ben McIntyre]

We’re setting up a Dashboard now in PoemwerBI which looks amazing for all reporting needs and does sync wit Accelo API. but there’s an issue with the Accelo App / API that’s waiting for Microsoft to assist Accelo for a fix. But once that’s done, powerBI is the answer. 

Really hoping Microsoft can accelerate the process. 

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Ben Mcintyre
BJM Design Pty Ltd.
(03) 9421 4747
b...@bjmdesign.com.au

[Andrew Legrand]

Basically, dataSight's value proposition is that the Accelo <> PowerBI integration doesn't work well out of the box, and they make it work better. They're also consultants, so when you need help, you can pay them hourly. (I can't see MS moving very quickly to fix that for Accelo).

@Ben, @David, are y'all working with consultants to setup Power BI that you could introduce me to? I wouldn't mind paying someone to help me get it setup right and train me a bit on creating reports.

On Friday, May 1, 2020 at 7:09:04 PM UTC-5, ben wrote:

We’re setting up a Dashboard now in PoemwerBI which looks amazing for all reporting needs and does sync wit Accelo API. but there’s an issue with the Accelo App / API that’s waiting for Microsoft to assist Accelo for a fix. But once that’s done, powerBI is the answer. 

Really hoping Microsoft can accelerate the process. 

On Sat, 2 May 2020 at 7:58 am, David Rudduck <dav...@insane.net.au> wrote:

Have you considered looking at whether PowerBI can do what you need?

Accelo _used_ to work with the free version of PowerBI that's included with Office 365, but it now seems to require the paid version.

Irrespective, quite a bit less than USD$270/month even with a couple of users having access to the dashboards.

On Saturday, 2 May 2020 04:52:38 UTC+10, Andrew Legrand wrote:

I'm curious to hear what solutions are out there, and I'm likely looking for a consultant to help me set this up.

The Accelo reporting needs to be customized for our business, and exporting to Excel doesn't seem like the best option. The KPIs I want to track CAN be calculated by my data in Accelo, so it's really a matter of exporting and presenting that information (which is probably easier said than done).

I've talked with the folks at DataSights, and they were helpful and professional. Their pricing seemed to be ~$270/mo USD, without any consultation hours, which is a bit steep for my very small 4 person shop. 

What other options are people using?

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[Marc Avila]

I would also love to find someone to help us set up some custom dashboards in Power BI. Also, we are looking to use Float and would like to create either a direct import or some standard report that we can copy and paste. 

I was going to reach out to DataInsights but it seems their operating hours are pretty much the opposite of ours since we are in the US. 

Thanks!

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[John Gillhespy]

Hi All,

 

Do you know if the Accelo/PowerBI API issue has been resolved?  Is there a guide that you can recommend on how to set this up with Accelo?

 

Thanks in advance

John

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[Ben McIntyre]

Hi All,

I don't believe the Microsoft > Accelo PowerBI API issue is resolved. Quite a shame as we look to critically measure KPI's across the team and track key Business Metrics, this issues is ultimately stopping us from being able to do that effectively. Might look at Klipfolio as an alternative but there does not seem to be an existing integration which is likely to be problematic in itself, however the Latest from Accelo in regards to Microsoft PowerBI is;

"This is still with Microsoft. We follow up multiple times a week asking for prioritization, but still have gotten no updates. We await for them to make the change we supplied them. As soon as it is updated I will let you know."

And the actual root cause is as follows;

-------

"This is a know bug and we are working on a fix with Microsoft right now. Essentially when Power BI users refresh data, the data is supplied to them via pagination. By default, pagination includes 10 records per page. However, the connector is currently assuming that there will be 50 records returned in each page. The result is that the data refresh automatically skips 40 records. For example we can see you staff table has ID's 1-10,51 showing. You guys have exactly 51 users, including inactive users. the result:

• Data refresh begins

• Page 1 requested; records 1-10 received

• Page 2 requested, with an offset of 50; records 51-60 received, but 51 is the last record set. 

I will let you know as soon as a fix is in place. I do apologize for the issues, but right now we are waiting on MS to make the update we supplied them to fix this. It is in their court currently. Hopefully, once we roll this fix out, you can get everything moving. Thank you for your patience! "

Ben McIntyre 
Director
phone: +61 3 9421 4747

BJM Digital
16/663 Victoria Street, Abbotsford VIC 3067
b...@bjmdigital.com.au
www.bjmdigital.com.au

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[John Gillhespy]

Thanks Ben

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[Tom Barrett]

Thanks for the update guys. We also tried to get dashboards set up in power BI but ran into this issue and have been replying on manual downloads which are very clunky and not giving us all the reporting we need. 

We use Databox at our digital agency for a lot for our KPI reporting from other software and would love for an Accelo/Databox integration in the future.

Tom

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[Andrew Swann]

Follwing as we'd love to get integration working with BI properly.

[Peter O'Halloran]

We tried the PowerBI integration just after it came out (so it may well be better now) but it really wasn't a good solution for us, and we weren't keen on the licensing for PowerBI to give us sub-par reporting. So we've gone a slightly different approach on this as we wanted to keep things as lightweight as possible and keep ongoing costs down. But we do also want to push our reporting as much as possible since we have Accelo and (almost) all our data is in one place. 

We're pulling our activity, project, ticket and contract data through the Accelo API into GCP Bigquery. This means we can build reports on most anything we need from there. Bigquery is very cost effective for data storage, even when your data sets get very large. The cost is in querying, which we keep down with caching and good table design.

We build our reports in Google DataStudio (which is free to use if your data is in GCP!). DataStudio doesn't quite have the functionality that PowerBI has, but we're still not pushing anywhere near the boundaries of what it can do. DataStudio also seems to be easier for most of our users to pick up and use than PowerBI, which has a steeper learning curve. 

Every now and then our users still pull manual exports when they want to do some adhoc reporting, but mostly BigQuery/DataStudio is taking over our reporting now. Even our customer facing reporting is now being built in DataStudio and delivered to customers, which means all reporting is coming from the same source and aligns perfectly.

I'd definitely recommend this as an approach. The SaaS dashboarding solutions that are out there are all quite expensive and the options for integration vary between them. Some of the cheaper ones don't have a data warehouse and just pull directly through the API, which would never work at any scale. We're keeping our costs very managable, which flex with the data usage, not with the number of users or reports.

[Andrew Legrand]

Peter,

We're currently importing data from Accelo API into Google Sheets, then creating charts in Google Sheets.

What made you choose Datastudio over sheets? I've been looking for a comparisson and I can't really find one.

[Peter O'Halloran]

Data Studio is good if your data source is in a data warehouse like Bigquery. Because you're pulling data directly into Google Sheets I think it would make sense to use Sheets to build your dashboard as well.

Sheets does have limits on the amount of data it can store though (5 million cells, I think), and because we are pulling in all our activities entity data we need something that will expand easily. Bigquery gets up to petabyte scale, so it's plenty big enough. In the future we'll be pulling in other data sources (like Xero, for example). Data Studio is the visualisation front end to a data set like Bigquery, or other data source. 

But you can even use Data Studio for data in Sheets. This is good because you can share your visualisations widely while protecting your data from people editing. And you can also combine the metrics from Sheets with other integrations, perhaps your website's Google Analytics data. 

Hope that helps!

[Andrew Legrand]

Thanks, Peter, that does help.

So far, I've also found that there's certain charts that Sheets provides that Data Studio doesn't, and vice versa. So I don't think it's an either or, but just another tool to send visualizations to a dashboard.

For the benefit of all, I wound up hiring DataSights to help with getting my data out of Accelo (and Xero and hopefully other apps in the future, too) and am using Sheets and DataStudio to blend that data and present charts and metrics on a Google Site.

I've only been with them a month, but they've been very helpful and I'm happy to recommend them. I understand what Peter is doing with pulling Accelo's API data into BigQuery, but I have no clue how to actually do that. DataSights is plugging that gap. :)