Forum Discussion

Swapneel's avatar
Swapneel
Advocate I
9 years ago
Solved

Error Connecting To Tally (Accounting Software) using ODBC

Hi,

 

I work for an Indian non-profit Dasra I'm trying to connect PowerBI Desktop to Tally ERP 9 (a popular accounting software used in India) using ODBC, to help better analyze our financial data.

 

I'm getting the below error.

 

Unexpected error: Unable to cast object of type 'System.DBNull' to type 'System.String'.

My OS (Windows 10), Excel, and Tally ERP are all 64-bit.

 

This most likely seems to be an ODBC issue (and not PowerBI), so apologies for posting this here.

But I've tried finding a solution all over the internet and could not find one.

 

Has anyone experienced something similar?

 

Do let me know if you require more details on the error.

 

Swapneel

  • mllopis's avatar
    mllopis
    9 years ago

    Hi Swapneel (and thanks arify for your help!),

     

    In the future, please use the Issues Forum for reporting bugs or issues like this one. Link: http://aka.ms/issues.powerbi.com

     

    This Community Forum is aimed at allowing users to interact/share solutions or questions for how to achieve something with Power BI, rather than reporting specific bugs (we have a whole separate forum for that :))

     

    Thanks,
    M.

8 Replies

  • arify's avatar
    arify
    Microsoft Employee
    9 years ago

    Hi Swapneel,

     

    Looks like the ODBC driver is giving us a null value where we don't expect it.

    1. Can you make sure you're using the latest version?
    2. If you're using the latest version, can you please send us a frown with traces? (Enable tracing from Options > Diagnostics > Enable Tracing (Verbose) (also you can open the Traces folder from here), then reproduce the failure, then close the PBI Desktop. You can get the traces from Traces folder.)

     

    Thanks

    • Swapneel's avatar
      Swapneel
      Advocate I
      9 years ago

      Thanks so much arify.

       

      I am using the latest versions of both PowerBI and Tally.

       

      Have emailed you the traces folder.

       

      Thanks again.

       

      Swapneel

      • arify's avatar
        arify
        Microsoft Employee
        9 years ago

        Hi again,

         

        I looked into the details you sent, looks like this ODBC driver is telling us that the table name is null. Does Tally have such tables? If not, this is a very big problem with this ODBC driver, and we can't do anything until they fix their bug.

  • ravikedia's avatar
    ravikedia
    New Member
    7 years ago

    Hi,

     

    There is a ready connector available for Tally which can import all data from Tally at pre-defined interval. You may connect on [email protected] for further details.

     

    Regards,

    Ravi