ComputerEase to Power BI: your options

The three options

1. Report books exported to Excel, then loaded into Power BI. Quick to start, manual forever.
2. The ComputerEase API. Good for job and vendor lists, missing the financials.
3. A nightly ODBC extract into a cloud database. All the transactional data, refreshed automatically. This is the option we recommend.

Report books to Excel

Someone exports a report to Excel, saves it somewhere Power BI can reach, and the dashboard refreshes from the file. It works for a first look. It doesn't scale: the dashboard is only as current as the last export, the export format can change under you, and one person becomes the refresh button.

The API

Power BI can call the ComputerEase API for jobs, vendors, employees and the item master. That's enough for a job list, not for job cost, AP aging, purchasing or cash, because the API doesn't return purchase orders, AP, the GL or inventory quantities. What the API covers.

A nightly extract

A scheduled job on the ComputerEase server reads the tables you need through the ComputerEase ODBC driver and lands them in Microsoft Fabric or Azure SQL in your own tenant. Readable views on top translate ComputerEase's codes into plain names, and Power BI reads those views. Fabric's Direct Lake mode lets reports read the data in place without a separate import refresh.

• Everything transactional is available: job cost detail, POs, receipts, AP, AR, inventory and the GL.
• Reports never query ComputerEase during the workday.
• Nightly data is right for nearly all job cost and financial reporting.

Why not connect Power BI straight to ComputerEase?

It looks simpler, but it causes three problems. The ODBC driver is 32-bit and lives on the ComputerEase server, so Power BI would need a gateway installed there. Every refresh would query your live ComputerEase files during the day, and you'd still be modeling raw ComputerEase tables in every report. A nightly extract with clean views solves all three.

ComputerEase quirks your reports have to handle

• Cost types aren't all costs. Job cost tables mix actual cost (labor, material, subcontract and so on) with units, billed amounts, change orders, committed cost and budget mirrors, distinguished by cost type code. Sum the wrong codes and job cost doubles.
• History can disappear. ComputerEase's reorganize utilities purge old purchase orders and inventory transactions. If you want history, your copy has to keep rows after ComputerEase deletes them.
• Inventory value isn't quantity times cost. On-hand value is stored as its own number, and hand edits in item maintenance don't post to the GL, so inventory can drift from the GL without anyone noticing.
• Job margin and GL margin can disagree, for specific posting reasons: GL entries without a job link in direct-cost accounts, job entries in overhead accounts, and edits made to job cost without a GL entry.
• Custom fields differ by company. Which user-defined field holds the salesperson or the close date is your setup, not a standard.

Licensing

On Microsoft Fabric capacities smaller than F64, everyone who views Power BI reports needs a Power BI Pro license. Microsoft 365 E5 includes it; most other plans don't. A small Fabric capacity plus Pro licenses for the people who read reports is the usual setup for a contractor.

This is our See package: the nightly extract, a Power BI model built for your codes, and three to five dashboards. See pricing.