Twinfield Power BI dashboard

Through the web services described by Twinfield, part of Wolters Kluwer, on its developer portal. They let you retrieve transactions, budgets, periods and master data, among other things. We load that data for each accounting entity and build the Power BI model on top of it.

You can read how we design a dashboard around a decision on our Power BI dashboards page.

With OpenID Connect and OAuth 2.0. You register a client on Twinfield’s developer portal and request a token with the right scopes; offline_access also gives you a refresh token. Token validation returns the cluster URL where you call the web services.

Each call includes the accounting entity’s code. You use the Finder to retrieve the accounting entities the user is allowed to see.

Using browse data: predefined financial datasets, each with its own browse code, such as 000 for general ledger transactions. You select the columns and apply a filter, for example by year and period.

Twinfield recommends retrieving transactions one period at a time and requesting only the columns you need, to avoid errors with large volumes of data. We structure the loading step accordingly.

The loading step processes the accounting entities returned by the Finder one by one and tracks which periods have already been loaded for each entity. If one fails, the others continue loading.

Each accounting entity has its own key in the model. That means a new client appears automatically in the existing reports.

Usually profit and loss statements and balance sheets by client and period, accounts receivable ageing, budget versus actuals, and results by cost centre or project. Twinfield provides dimension types for balance sheets, profit and loss, accounts receivable, accounts payable, cost centres and projects, as well as a separate web service for budgets.

You can read about the management information included in a financial dashboard in Power BI on that page.

The web services return only the accounting entities that the account associated with the token is authorised to access in Twinfield. Use a separate service account rather than an employee’s account, as employees may leave.

In Power BI, row-level security ensures that a client sees only their own accounting entity, and you create an app for each user group. We describe how to set up workspaces and permissions on our Power BI consultant page.

We build the same kind of model for those systems; only the way we retrieve the data differs. See our pages on Exact Online, AFAS SB and AFAS Payroll in Power BI.

If your clients use different systems, we map their accounts to a single reporting structure.

When you have only a handful of accounting entities and Twinfield’s own reports are sufficient. Or when each entity has its own chart of accounts and transactions are posted differently for each client: in that case, you need to put the foundations in order first. See data quality.

If a lighter solution will do, that’s what we recommend.