Multi-tenant Power BI Reports on Exact Online for Accountants

Accountants typically want to provide reports in Power BI to their customers based upon the data managed, but data security is necessary to ensure individual companies only see the companies they are authorized to. This article explains you how to configure Invantive Bridge Online such that the same Power BI report displays data from different companies, despite use of the same environment. In IT-terms: how to make Power BI multi-tenant?

Instructions

Execute the following steps:

  • Authorize Invantive Bridge Online on Exact Online using an login account that has at least read access on the relevant Exact Online companies, either internal companies or from entrepreneurs with their own subscription at Exact.
  • Create at least a separate Bridge Online user per company (tenant) that you want to grant access associated with these credentials.
  • Provide the user only access to the partitioned data. Uncheck non-partitioned data to exclude overall tables such as SystemDivisions and Users.
  • Each user has a different list of Exact Online companies the user is granted access to.
  • Create a Power BI report.
  • Save it as a Power BI template (*.pbit). This removes all data from the data, and also reduces the size considerably.
  • Provide the pbit file to each of your customers, together with the Invantive Bridge Online user name and password.
  • When the pbit file opens, your contact person at the customer enters the URL of Bridge Online, together with the provided credentials.
  • The data is refreshed, taking only data from his company.