OData and Power BI Integration for Standard Time®

What Is the OData Feed?

OData (Open Data Protocol) is an OASIS open standard for exposing data over HTTP as a REST API. When Standard Time® has the OData feature enabled, it runs a small web server that answers structured HTTP requests with JSON — the same format Power BI uses when connecting to any web API.

From Power BI's perspective, the Standard Time® OData feed looks like a database connection. You write one short M query per entity, point it at the endpoint with your API key, and Power BI loads the data as a named table. Once the tables are in the model, you build relationships between them and create visuals exactly as you would with any other data source.

The key difference from a database connection is that Standard Time® is the authoritative source — time logs, project edits, expense scans, and inventory changes all go through Standard Time® first, then flow to Power BI on the next refresh. There is no intermediate database to maintain or synchronize.

No More Manual Exports

The most immediate benefit of the OData integration is eliminating the recurring export-import cycle. In a typical shop without it, a manager who wants a weekly hours summary has to:

1. Open Standard Time® and apply the right date filters
2. Export to CSV or Excel
3. Save the file somewhere and open it
4. Rebuild any pivot tables or formulas that reference the new data
5. Repeat the entire cycle next week

With the OData feed, steps 1–4 collapse into a single click. The Power BI report you built last month is still valid today — click Refresh and the tables update in place. All visuals, slicers, and measures recalculate automatically against the new data.

For shops that do this reporting daily or weekly, the time savings compound quickly. For managers who share reports with others, the OData approach also means everyone looks at the same live numbers rather than whoever-had-the-freshest-export.

Eleven Entity Sets Available

The Standard Time® OData feed exposes eleven entity sets. Each becomes its own table in Power BI, and you join them in the Model view to build cross-entity reports:

TimeLogs Projects ProjectTasks Subprojects Users Clients Expenses Inventory Categories Invoices BillingRates

TimeLogs is the central fact table — every time entry your employees record, whether from the desktop client, the cloud barcode scanner, or a manual entry, flows into this entity. Columns include who logged the time, which project and task it belongs to, start and end timestamps, duration in hours, billable flag, and computed cost fields.

Expenses is the material-usage equivalent of TimeLogs. Every inventory barcode scan that records consumption — INV-ADD, INV-SUB, INV-BUILD — creates an Expense record automatically. Joining TimeLogs and Expenses on ProjectID gives you full job cost: labor hours plus material consumption in one table.

The remaining entities are dimension tables that give context to those fact rows: Projects and ProjectTasks describe the work, Users and Clients identify who and whom, Inventory tracks what was consumed, Categories let you break down time by type, and Invoices and BillingRates round out the financial picture.

Four Dashboards You Can Build Today

The most common starting points for Standard Time® OData users are these four dashboards. Each is described in detail — with step-by-step build instructions — in the Build Four Dashboards in Power BI guide.

Shop Floor Time & Utilization

Uses TimeLogs joined to Users, Projects, and Categories. Key visuals: hours by employee (bar chart), daily trend line, billable vs. non-billable donut, and a utilization percentage KPI card. This is the dashboard most shops build first — it answers "who worked on what and for how long" in one glance.

Project Budget vs. Actuals

Uses Projects, ProjectTasks, and TimeLogs. Compare estimated duration and cost on each task against what has actually been logged. Percent-complete bars and variance columns make it obvious which work orders are on track and which are over budget before the job ships.

Full Job Cost — Labor + Materials

Joins TimeLogs and Expenses on ProjectID to produce a single cost view: labor hours, labor cost, material cost, and total job cost per work order. This is the dashboard that closes the loop between time tracking and inventory consumption — the two halves of what a job actually costs to run.

Inventory Health & Consumption

Uses Inventory and Expenses. Track current stock levels against reorder thresholds, see which parts are being consumed fastest, and identify which jobs are driving the highest material costs. Useful for purchasing decisions and for spotting unusual consumption patterns before they become shortages.

Not Just Power BI

The same OData endpoint and the same API key work in any tool that can send an authenticated HTTP GET request. The most common alternatives:

• Microsoft Excel — Data → Get Data → From OData Feed. Results land in a Power Query table you can pivot and refresh on demand.
• Tableau — Connect → To a Server → OData. Tableau handles pagination automatically and supports the same filter parameters.
• Grafana — Use the Infinity data source plugin with type set to JSON and the OData URL as the endpoint. Popular for wall-mounted shop floor displays.
• Python / pandas — A single requests.get(url, headers={"X-Api-Key": key}) call returns parseable JSON. Feed it directly into a DataFrame for custom analysis or ETL pipelines.
• Power Automate — HTTP action with the OData URL, parse the JSON, and push data to Teams, SharePoint, or email — no Power BI license required.

Because OData 4.0 is an OASIS open standard (ISO/IEC 20802), any tool that advertises OData compatibility works with Standard Time® out of the box — no custom connector needed.