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The 9.4 changelog included a very small snippet about the creation of a Power BI connector for SB: Version 9.4 Release Notes – Smokeball Support Hub, 

The information available (Power BI Integration – Smokeball Support Hub) is minimally focused on establishing the connection between SB and Power BI, a data visualization application. The article explains “Since Power BI reports can be highly complex, building custom reports and dashboards falls outside the scope of Smokeball Support.” Therefore, I would like to pool information here regarding this new resource on this thread.

My initial observations follow. 

The available data points are stated to include (my notes in parentheses):

  • Activities (This is activity codes for billing, not items from the “Activity” tab of SB Desktop).
  • Contacts
  • Expenses
  • Fees
  • Invoices
  • Matters
  • Matter Types
  • Payments
  • Roles (This is Staff assigned to matters)
  • Staff
  • Transactions

Left out then are:

  • Tasks
  • Activity items (from Activity tab - this could be useful in monitoring or evaluating employee performance)
  • Calendar / Events
  • Communicates (not sure why these would matter)
  • Matter Files (not sure why these would matter)

It is unclear from my initial review how exactly fees/expenses, invoices, and payments work together to attribute income to fee earners. This is necessary for useful financial reporting. Perhaps ​@Sara Sultan can shed some insight on how the fields and calculations in the related tables are used to attribute payments to fee earners.

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