How to connect Power BI to Rivilė: what you need to know before you start

Rivilė already holds all the data you need to make decisions: sales, cost of sales, stock levels, customer debts. The problem is getting it out, usually by exporting it to Excel by hand, all over again every month. Connecting Power BI does away with that work.

In this article, we look at what is actually needed from your company and how the whole process works up close.

What you need to provide

The list is shorter than most people expect:

• Access to the Rivilė database. Read-only rights are enough; nothing needs to be changed in Rivilė itself.
• A decision on where the reports will run. Usually this is the Power BI cloud service, available in a browser and on a phone.
• Microsoft licences for the staff who will view the reports.
• One person on your side who can answer questions about how your accounts are set up: how departments are coded, whether product groups are used, how discounts are recorded.

No technical preparation is needed from you; we build the data model and the reports.

How the connection works

1. Granting access and reviewing the data. First, we look at how the data is organised in your Rivilė. This step often uncovers things that would later have distorted the reports, such as product groups entered inconsistently.

2. Tailoring the reports. The ready-built report package is adapted to your departments, product groups and the way you define your metrics.

3. Setting up automatic refresh. We configure how often the data refreshes and the access rights, meaning who sees which data.

4. Reviewing it with you. We go through the reports, explain how to read each metric and adjust anything that does not match the way you work.

With a ready-built package, all of this usually takes a few days, because the reports are already built: it is a matter of tailoring, not building from scratch.

Which reports you get straight away

The ready-built package works with Rivilė data to provide:

• a management summary with the key metrics;
• revenue and expense analytics with a comparison against budget;
• sales analysis with margin and average invoice value;
• customer analysis covering new and lost customers;
• receivables and late payments reports;
• stock levels and slow-moving stock;
• the balance sheet and the profit and loss statement.

Is the data secure?

The connection to the database runs over an encrypted link and, where needed, through a VPN. Users sign in to the reports with multi-factor authentication (MFA), and access rights can be restricted so that, for example, a department manager sees only the data for their own site.

The connection is read-only: the reports write nothing to Rivilė and change nothing in it. We cover the security side in more detail in a separate article.

What to check in Rivilė before you start

How quickly the set-up goes almost always depends on how tidy the data is, not on the technology. Four things are worth reviewing in advance:

• Whether departments are coded consistently. If the same site has been called different things at different times, the breakdown by department will be inaccurate.
• Whether product groups are in order. Analysis by group is only as good as the consistency with which the groups have been entered.
• How discounts are recorded. This determines whether margin will be calculated correctly.
• Whether returns are assigned to the same period. If not, month-on-month comparisons will fluctuate for no reason.

None of these stops you from starting; they simply decide whether the first version of the reports is accurate straight away or after one round of corrections.

How often the data refreshes

As standard, once a day, overnight, so the morning report is already ready. If needed, the refresh can be set to run more often, several times a day.

In practice, a daily cycle is enough for almost all financial metrics. More frequent refreshes are rarely needed, mostly in retail and wholesale, where stock levels matter in real time.

One thing is important to remember: a report shows what has been entered in Rivilė. If documents are recorded late, the report inherits that delay.

What if you use more than Rivilė?

A common situation is Rivilė for the accounts, plus a till system, a CRM or Excel files with the budget and plans.

In that case, the ready-built package covers the financial side, and the other sources are connected to the same data model separately. Nothing needs to be redone: new reports are built on top of the foundation that is already working. We explain how this is costed in the article ready-built package or custom project.

Where to start

The simplest route is to choose a ready-built package based on how many reports you need: Rivilė Basic with 8 reports or Rivilė PRO with 20. Prices and differences are on the pricing page.

If you need data not only from Rivilė but from other systems as well, we describe those solutions on the Power BI implementation page.