Building Reports from Cloud Service Data: The Top 5 Techniques (Ranked by Difficulty)

Today, business data is often scattered across multiple cloud platforms like Xero , HubSpot , Cin7, Simpro Software and thousands more.? These apps offer immense power at a fraction of the cost of custom software. But as your business spreads across more services, your data becomes siloed inventory might be in Unleashed or Cin7, sales data in Vend or Revel, and staff costs in Deputy or Tanda. With every new cloud service you add, your data becomes more fragmented.

This fragmentation means that a modern Power BI developer needs to not only understand reports but understand some pretty technical software development skills.? In this article we'll consider the pros and cons of various methods for data extraction, so you can get back to doing what you do best - building awesome reports.

1. Native Reports

• Geek Level: 0/10
• Benefits: Free, easy to use, often real-time.
• Cons: Limited customization lacks granular data.

Any worthwhile cloud service offers some built-in reports—like "Sales by Product" for a POS system or "Balance Sheet" for accounting software. The problem is that these reports are within the cloud platform itself - not in Power BI where you can consolidate the information into your existing dashboards.

2. CSV Exports

• Geek Level: 2/10
• Benefits: Free, more granular data.
• Cons: High manual effort, limited customization.

Many cloud applications let you export data as CSV files, which can then be imported into Power BI. CSV exports offer more granular data, allowing almost limitless possibilities for grouping, sorting, and filtering in your own spreadsheets. But there's still a lot of manual work involved in downloading and manipulating the data, which is prone to human error. For complex reports that need multiple data sets, this approach can become very tedious.

3. Reporting Directly Against the API

• Geek Level: 6/10
• Benefits: Real-time data, no manual intervention.
• Cons: Requires software development skills, API throttling, performance issues, API downtime.

Most cloud applications provide an API (Application Programming Interface) to access data programmatically. With tools like Power Query, you can connect to APIs and fetch data in real time. This approach, however, requires significant technical skills - you need to deal with authentication, JSON, web requests, and more. Plus, APIs often have throttling limits and performance issues, making this approach impractical for anything but simple reports.

4. Staging Your API Data in a Database

• Geek Level: 9/10
• Benefits: Near real-time data, resilient to API downtime, highly performant, no manual intervention.
• Cons: Requires advanced development skills, additional hosting costs

The issues with direct API access can be mitigated by using a data warehouse. Instead of querying the API in real time, you run background processes to continuously fetch data and store it in a dedicated database. Your reports then query this database, rather than the API directly. This approach greatly improves performance and resilience to API downtime, but it requires significant development effort and ongoing hosting costs.

5. A Hosted Staging Service

• Geek Level: 0/10 (let someone else do it!)
• Benefits: No software skills needed, near real-time data, resilient to API downtime, highly performant, no manual intervention.
• Cons: Hosting costs

This solution is similar to staging your API data, but the technical work is handled by a third-party service. You get all the benefits of a data warehouse without needing to develop or maintain it yourself, which means you can focus on what you're best at - Power BI. Yes, there are usually hosting costs, but these are easily recovered with the savings you make in time and stress.? Services like SyncHub offer a free trial and take only a few minutes to get started, so it's well worth checking your options before embarking on your next cloud reporting project.