hey everyone Chris here from the support team I wanted to create a quick video to
demonstrate how you can use the financials web services for reporting
you don't have to have any developer knowledge to make use of the OData v4
endpoints you can pull data into Excel or power bi and build reports right now
so let's take a look at the web services page the web services page is where you
can expose pages queries that you want to be able to pull information out of
financials and down to Excel or power bi to build reports it's very easy to do
you can use these links over here and you can pick new pages to expose
depending on the data that you need to pull on the reports that you want to
build let's start off by taking a look at the sales document lines and sales
documents web services first thing you'll want to do is make sure that your
user has a web service access key generated so let's navigate to the user
screen I'll select my user and what you're looking for here is that you have
a web service access key for the user generated if you don't you can use this
button at the top to generate one but you will want to have a copy of your
user name here and your web service access key here as these will be used
for your username and password when you go to connect to the web service
endpoints now that I have my username and password I'm going to navigate to
excel in Excel we can go to data get data from other sources from a data feed
and this will pull up a prompt asking for the URL back in financials I will
select my sales documents oh data v4 URL I will copy that shortcut come back to
Excel and paste that in now it's going to come up for authentication for the
authentication what a basic and we we will use that username and password that
we just got off the user card once I paste that in here and hit connect we
should be getting a preview of the data that we are pulling from that Oh dad if
feed there we go this is our purchase header information I'll go ahead and
load that now I'm going to navigate to a new sheet and do the same thing we'll go
to data get data from other sources from one out of feed and this time we will
copy our sales document lines owed out of e4 URL and we'll plug that in and
this time Excel will remember our credentials and it should just load up
the preview immediately now you can edit here if you want to I'm just going to
load it all in and now I have a refreshable set of data header and line
data that I could slice and dice and build reports off of in Excel if you
have an Excel power user that you can give this to a refreshable report they
can start making reports off this immediately let's take a look at another
example and how we can add new web services I once had someone asked me if
there was a report that showed you the inventory on jobs versus the inventory
quantity on hand they wanted to be able to see if they were going to have enough
inventory on hand to fulfill jobs in real time I don't think we have a report
like this but I said we could build one off of the web services on the web
services page if you want to add a new page to expose that for building reports
you can do so by using this create data set wizard now for the report that I'm
talking about we will need to have items page and job planning lines page exposed
items page is already exposed so we just need to expose the job planning lines
let's go through the wizard create a new data set this data source ID section you
can click the ellipsis to do the lookup and I can do a search here on job I'll
do job and then I should be able to find the job planning Lions page here it is
right here so that's the one I'll add
give it a name hit next and then it allow you to filter the data that you
want to pull this doesn't really matter
so we'll just publish it hit finish and I should get a job planning lines web
service published now here it is right here so now I have items and job
planning lines I should have the web services I need to build the report so
let's jump into power bi desktop going to be pulling the data into power bi
desktop in almost the exact same way that I did with Excel and go to get data
out add a feed and I'm going to grab my URLs go with items plug that in and then
it will ask for credentials or we will use our username and our web service
access key and this should give us a preview of the data just like Excel did
there's my inventory and my quantity on hand now I know the data that I need to
build this report so I'm going to add it
you