Integrate your platform data with Power BI
Steps to integrate your data with Power BI
- 1 Who the Power BI integration is for
- 2 What does the Power BI integration do?
- 3 🎯What benefits will I gain from integrating?
- 4 Is the Power BI integration worth it for my business?
- 5 🧩What do I need to use this integration?
- 6 1. Set up the integration
- 7 2. Using the integration
- 8 Example reports
- 9 Data source relationships
- 10 FAQs
Download the Power BI module brief:
Please note
accessplanit’s Power BI integration is an additional, chargeable module. Please speak to your Customer Success Manager to see if this is already included within your accessplanit package or to find out more information!
Related Help Guide Pages
Turn your training data into real business insight!
Connect your platform to Microsoft Power BI to build live dashboards that show performance, revenue, and trends with real-time data, without exporting data or manually compiling reports.
🚀 Ready to jump straight in? Click here to jump to the setup steps!
Who the Power BI integration is for
This module is for you if you are currently:
Exporting data into spreadsheets to build reports
Spending time manually compiling monthly or weekly reports
Struggling to get a clear, real-time view of performance
Being asked for insights (not just data) by leadership
Pulling together data from multiple systems (such as accessplanit + accounting software + marketing software) to answer questions
Without a BI tool, it’s easy to miss trends, delays in reporting, and opportunities to improve performance or revenue
What does the Power BI integration do?
1. Build real-time performance dashboards
Within Power BI you can create dashboards that show:
Course bookings and revenue trends
Delegate attendance and completion rates
Trainer performance and utilisation
Instead of static reports, your team can see what’s happening right now and act on it.
2. Give leadership instant visibility
Provide your leadership team with a single dashboard to:
Track your KPIs
Monitor performance against targets
Identify risks and opportunities early
Power BI dashboards bring data from multiple sources into one clear view, which help teams quickly understand performance and make decisions.
🎯What benefits will I gain from integrating?
With the Power BI module, you will:
Save hours on reporting
Automate your reporting process to eliminate manual exports and spreadsheet admin!Make faster, more confident decisions
Turn raw data into clear, visual insights that support better decision-makingBring all your data together
Combine your accessplanit training data with finance, sales, or CRM data into one dashboardSpot trends and opportunities early
Identify revenue trends, underperforming courses, or growth opportunities quicklyEmpower your team with self-serve insights
Give non-technical users, and non-accessplanit Users, access to your Power BI dashboards so they can answer their own questions
Before integrating with Power BI | After integrating with Power BI |
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Is the Power BI integration worth it for my business?
Let’s talk about time savings! The integration with Power BI is designed to reduce the time your team spends compiling and reporting on your data, giving you that time back to focus on your customers.
For a typical training company, the biggest time savings come from two areas:
Reduction in ad-hoc reporting requests to administrators
Hours saved on manual reporting
1. Reduction in ad-hoc manual reporting requests to administrators
A common challenge in many training organisations is the volume of ad-hoc reporting requests, these are typically simple data requests such as:
“Can you pull last month’s course revenue?”
“How many delegates are booked next week?”
“What’s our trainer utilisation this quarter?”
While each request may be straightforward, they can collectively take up a significant amount of admin time to produce. They can also slow down decision-making, as leaders often need to wait for data to be prepared before they can act.
With Power BI, over 60% of these everyday reporting requests can be self-served through live dashboards. This means managers and stakeholders can access the information they need instantly, without waiting for administrators to build or send reports.
In practical terms, even a conservative estimate shows the impact - if your admin team collectively spends around 5 hours per week handling ad-hoc reporting requests, this quickly adds up to 250+ hours per year that could be saved.
2. Faster access to reporting and insights
A key benefit of Power BI is the significant reduction in time spent on manual reporting, while also dramatically speeding up access to business insight.
In many training organisations, administrators and managers spend considerable time:
Extracting data from multiple systems
Cleaning and preparing spreadsheets
Building recurring weekly and monthly reports
Responding to reporting requests from stakeholders
With Power BI, reporting is automated and always up to date. Dashboards provide real-time access to accurate data, removing the need for manual report creation and distribution.
This typically results in up to 70% faster access to reporting and insights as reporting cycles reduce from 2–3 days to same-day or instant access.
Together, this means teams spend significantly less time producing reports and more time acting on the insights they provide.
🧩What do I need to use this integration?
To use the Power BI integration, you will need access to Microsoft Power BI within your organisation.
This integration works by connecting your accessplanit platform data to Power BI, allowing you to build dashboards and reports using your platform information. Because of this, you’ll need a Power BI account set up and ready to connect.
If you’re unsure whether you already have access to Power BI, we recommend checking with your internal IT team or speaking to your Customer Success Manager, who can guide you through the next steps.
Please note
While the Power BI integration uses accessplanit API feeds to provide data, you do not need the API module for it to work.
1. Set up the integration
Follow the steps below to connect your platform data to Power BI and start building your dashboards!
There are three steps to set up Power BI ready for your integration :
Purchase the module
Download Power BI
Set up Power BI to support accessplanit
1.1. Purchase the module with accessplanit
If you haven’t already purchased the Power BI integration, get in touch with your accessplanit CSM to add this to your package!
1.2. Download Power BI
If you do not yet have Power BI installed on your computer, complete these steps first
From the Microsoft Store, download and install the Power BI application
Once installed, open Power BI
You can then login to Power BI using your Microsoft credentials
1.3. Set up Power BI to support accessplanit
Please note
These steps may vary if Power BI updates their user interface. If you’re unable to follow the instructions, please contact Microsoft support directly. Please let us know too, so we can review and update these steps!
Open ‘Options and settings’ from the main Power BI page, or the File menu
Open the ‘Options’ menu
Open the ‘Security’ options
Update your Data Extensions option to ‘Allow any extension to load without validation or warning’
Confirm this change
Close your Power BI app
Open your Windows File Explorer and look for the path:
C:\Documents\Power BI Desktop\Custom Connectors
If your organisation uses OneDrive, this may also look like
C:\Users\YourName\OneDrive - accessplanit ltd\Documents\Power BI Desktop\Custom Connectors
If this path does not exist, create folders to create it
Please note
The folder names must be an exact match to Documents\Power BI Desktop\Custom Connectors
Any spelling inconsistencies will stop you from being able to access the accessplanit api from your Power BI application.
Upload the following .mez folder to this folder:
Reopen Power BI
From the Home tab, click to ‘Get data from other sources’
Search for & select ‘accessplanit API (Custom)’
Click ‘Connect'
Confirm the third party service notification
You are then prompted to complete the accessplanit API Connector form, leave this form open for now
We will return to it in Integrate your platform data with Power BI
1.4. Generate your accessplanit API key
Open your accessplanit platform
Open the ‘Administration’ menu from the Profile options at the top-right of your platform
Open the ‘API Keys’ menu option to access the page where you can create a new API Key for this integration
Please note
The option to generate API keys is not available to all Admins, please get in touch with a member of the Support Team if you are unable to access this option
Click the green ‘Add API Key’ button
Provide your API Key with a name, e.g. ‘Power BI’
Copy the provided API Key and save it somewhere secure
Set your API key to be ‘Enabled’
Read more about API Keys
If you would like to know more about API Keys, and the other options available (such as the Expiration Date) please see our dedicated guide: API v2 - Developer Resources
Click the ‘Save’ button at the top of the page to create your API Key
2. Using the integration
Here is how to generate the JSON in your accessplanit platform to integrate your data into Power BI!
Open the Administration Menu in your accessplanit platform
Search for and open the Power BI Query Generator
Please note
The Power BI Query Generator is only available to Super Admins, please get in touch with a member of the Support Team if you are unable to access this option
At the top of the Query Generator page, select which platform modules you would like to include data for in your Power BI Query
For each module, select which fields of data you would like to include in your query
Top tip!
Use your platform DataGrids to see what data is stored in each field!
If you’re unsure whether to include a field, it’s best to include it - adding fields later means re-running the query generator. You can always exclude any unneeded fields once the data is in Power BI.
For each module, add in any filters that you would like to limit the results in your query
When you are happy with your module selection, field selection, and filters, click the ‘Generate Query’ button at the bottom left of the page
This will generate the query at the bottom of the page! Click ‘Copy’
Return to your Power BI window from Integrate your platform data with Power BI
In ‘Site URL’ enter the full URL of your platform, up to the accessplan or accessplansandbox if you are integrating Sandbox data
e.g. https://platformname.accessplanit.com/accessplanIn ‘Field Selection JSON’ paste in the JSON you copied in step 7
e.g. {"Company":{"ModuleDisplayName":"Account","Fields":[{"PropertyName"…..In ‘Record Limit’ enter the maximum number of records that should be included from each module
e.g. 5000
You can add -1 to include all data, however if you have large amounts of data, this may cause the query to run slowlyIn ‘Order By’ enter how you would like the data to be sorted by typing in the name of the field to sort by and whether you would like this asc (ascending a-z) or desc (descending z-a), this is an optional setting
Once you have completed the form, click ‘OK’ to proceed
You will then be prompted to enter your API Key
Enter the key that you generated in Integrate your platform data with Power BI and click ‘Connect’
This will open the Navigator window where you can select the data sources to include
We recommend selecting your data sources and opening the ‘Transform Data’ option first and setting the correct data type against each field
You may have some fields where there are multiple values included for each row, for example Course Templates can be linked to multiple Categories, so the Category IDs and Category Labels in the Course Templates data source are initially included as a ‘list’
Click the arrows icon at the top right of the column header to open your options for these fields:
Expand to New Rows = create duplicate lines in the data for each value in the list
For example a Course Template assigned to two Categories would now be listed in the data twice with a line per CategoryExtract Values = will create a delimited list of the values all in the same record
For example a Course Template assigned to two Categories would still be listed in the data once, with the Categories listed with a delimiter (e.g. a comma or a semi-colon)
'Close and apply' your transformation
The data will then load
You’ll then be able to access it from the 'Data' area of Power BI!
Use the ‘Manage Relationships’ option to connect the data sources together so that you can report on the data from multiple sources together
See our Integrate your platform data with Power BI guide if you would like support with this!
Example reports
Here are some example reports that you can create within Power BI using your accessplanit data!
Data source relationships
If you’re struggling to match data sources together, in this section we outline key relationships between modules for Power BI.
Linking Users, Employment, Accounts and Account Groups
Users (UserID) > Employment (UserID) Cardinality: Many to one | Employment (EmployerID) > Account (AccountID) Cardinality: Many to one | Account (Account Group IDs) > Account Group (ID) Cardinality: Many to one |
Linking Delegates, Courses, and Course Templates
Delegate (CourseID) > Course Date (ID) Cardinality: Many to one | Course Date (Course Template ID) > Course Templates (Course Template ID Cardinality: Many to one |
Linking Users and Delegates
Delegate (Delegate ID) > Users (UserID) Cardinality: Many to one |
Linking Delegates and Placeholders with Invoices
Invoice (ID) > Invoice Item (Invoice ID) Cardinality: Many to one | Invoice Item (Source ID) > Delegate (ID) Cardinality: Many to one | Invoice Item (Source ID) > Placeholder (ID) Cardinality: Many to one |
Linking Invoices, Invoice Items, and Transactions
Invoice (ID) > Invoice Item (Invoice ID) Cardinality: Many to one | Invoice (ID) > Transaction (Invoice ID) Cardinality: Many to one
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Linking Delegates and Placeholders with Bookings
Booking (Reference) > Delegate (Course Booking ID) Cardinality: Many to one | Booking (Reference) > Placeholder (Course Booking ID) Cardinality: Many to one |
Linking Invoices to Target Account
Invoice (Target ID) > Account (AccountID) Cardinality: Many to one
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Linking Invoices to Target User
Invoice (Target ID) > User (UserID) Cardinality: Many to one |
FAQs
Here are some common questions that we receive about the integration between accessplanit and Power BI and their answers.
Who can access the Power BI Query Generator?
What is the Power BI Query Generator?
Do I need any technical knowledge to use this integration?
What kind of data can I bring into Power BI?
Can I connect data from multiple modules in one report?
How often does the data update in Power BI?
Data updates when you refresh your dataset in Power BI.
You can manually refresh or configure Power BI to refresh automatically (depending on your Power BI setup).
Can I filter which data comes through?
Is there a limit to how much data I can import?
Is the integration secure?
Can I use this integration with my sandbox platform?
Can I use the integration with Power BI Desktop and Power BI Online?
Will this integration cost extra?
What if I need help setting this up?