Reporting on your window furnishings data with Excel & Power BI

The reports built into your business software are only ever the starting point. Sooner or later you want to slice the numbers your way — sales by rep and branch, conversion by lead source, product mix by season — and build dashboards your team actually looks at. The good news: if your data lives in BUZ, you don’t need to export spreadsheets by hand. You can connect Excel or Power BI straight to a live OData feed and refresh on demand.

What OData gives you

OData is a standard way for tools like Excel and Power BI to read data from a system over the web. BUZ exposes your reporting data — sales orders, leads, jobs and more — through an OData feed, and each report becomes a table you can load, shape and visualise. Connect once, and refreshing is a single click whenever you want the latest numbers.

That means:

• Excel users can pull BUZ data in through Power Query and build the pivot tables and workbooks they already know.
• Power BI users can build rich, interactive dashboards — and schedule them to refresh — for a live view of the business.

Both read from the same feed, so the numbers reconcile.

Getting connected (the short version)

1. In Power BI Desktop or Excel, choose Get Data → OData feed.
2. Enter the BUZ reports feed URL and sign in with your BUZ reporting credentials (your organisation code and BUZ login).
3. Pick the report you want — for example your sales report — and load or transform it.
4. Shape the columns and filters you need, then build your visuals.

(If your organisation hasn’t used the feed before, BUZ Support can enable it for you.)

Keep it fast: report on the window you need

The most common reporting mistake is asking for everything — every job, since the beginning of time — every time you refresh. That makes reports slow and can time out entirely. A few habits keep your reporting quick and reliable:

• Always set a date range. Filter by a “Date From” and “Date To” rather than pulling the entire history. Most questions are about a period — this month, this quarter, last financial year — so scope the query to it.
• Keep the range reasonable during business hours. Very large pulls (many months of every job) are best run as a smaller range, or outside peak times, so they don’t compete with everyone else’s live work.
• Filter before you load, not after. Trim to the columns and rows you actually need in the query step. A lean model refreshes faster and is easier to build on.
• Build once, refresh often. The whole point is that you set the report up once and just hit refresh. Resist rebuilding from scratch each time.

Follow those and a dashboard that used to take an afternoon to assemble becomes a one-click refresh.

What to build first

If you’re starting out, a few reports earn their keep immediately:

• Sales by rep and branch — who and where is converting.
• Lead conversion by source — which marketing is actually producing jobs (pairs perfectly with a “how did you hear about us?” field on your enquiry form).
• Jobs by status — a live view of what’s in production, dispatch and install.
• Product mix — what you’re actually selling, by category and season.

The takeaway

You don’t have to choose between the reports your software ships with and the flexibility of a spreadsheet. With a live OData feed into Excel or Power BI, your BUZ data becomes the single source your own dashboards are built on — accurate, current, and a click away.

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BUZ exposes your reporting data through a live OData feed that Excel and Power BI connect to directly. Book a demo and we’ll show you the reports your business should be watching.