Connecting to Xero data from Desktop application?

Hi Elizabeth,

Acterys (formerly Clear Jelly) maintains a copy of your Xero data as a cloud based data model optimized for analytics with all relationships and relevant financial measures. This model gets automatically updated or manually refreshed by the user when new data is available in Xero.

As opposed to direct access via the API that has a variety of problems (API call limitations, single entity access/ no consolidation, performance, limited refresh) Acterys creates (and automatically refreshes) a proper Azure SQL data model with all relationships and dimension tables as well as financial DAX calculations that is fully editable, supports Direct Query and write back for forecasting and planning requirements.

Quickbooks (a system that Acterys supports as well - an alternative to Xero) attempts that with a Power BI connector to their system but because of the above mentioned limitations it just doesn't work (extremely slow refresh etc.) . I am happy to take opinions here but I really think there is no alternative to having a proper data model approach for financial applications. In Acterys that only takes a click and avoids paying expensive consultants to build a model for them that typically takes extensive time and investment.

Martin

hi karaoan,  i not understand with "There is only an app which only supports one entity and it can't be edited in Power Desktop." That's mean will be only some "build-in report" for xero that is not editable?

clearjelly is free apps or need to pay?

How about powerBI Pro and Premium? can connect to XERO directly?

Even if a direct API access from Power BI Desktop is possible, it is typically not a great idea as:

1. You will always be at the mercy of "allowed API calls per day" limitations.

2. There are often issues with multi entity (consolidation) access.

3. Access via the API will not provide a proper data warehouse/star schema which means that working with it will be slow, have a limited user experiene and will always require additional work on the front end side. 

All these problems are already apparent when you use the QuickBooks direct access connector in Power BI Desktop that uses the Quickbooks API.

Feel free to contact me, for further questions on this.

Martin

Planning With Power BI -> https://www.acterys.com

Hi Sam,

1. What are you expecting the reporting to do for you?

- Able to generate Financial Report, Budget Report, Forecasting Report etc.... Maybe link to HR data for HR Report etc.

2. Are you trying to generate reports for a really big organisation or a small one?

- We are concrete supplier, we might need to generate the sales report and other internal report.

3. How many transactions are you expecting to come through each week?

- for sales, normally 400 to 500 line but may be higher than that.

4. Do you need near real time processing or is it a case of needing to see transactions up to say yesterday?

- yes, for management planning, material planning and sales forecast.

5. Does it need to be fully automated or would it be okay to have an extract run?

- depend on the complexity of the extract task, if got automated will use automated method.