What is report bursting in Power BI? Why is it important?
In Power BI, 'report bursting' refers to the process of running a single report, filtering it for different recipients (e.g., by region, manager or department) and automatically distributing those personalized versions.
Businesses routinely need to send reports to their stakeholders. Automated report bursting helps businesses build consistent and reliable engagement with stakeholders such as customers, vendors and employees. It empowers business intelligence and reporting teams by enabling them to focus on analysis and insights rather than repetitive manual tasks.
BI Helper is a SaaS application that automates report bursting in Power BI to external (customers, vendors) and internal (employees) users.
Does Power BI offer any automated report bursting options?
Power BI offers two methods to automate report bursting and deliver user-specific PDF or Power Point files to users - Subscribe to email and using Power Automate.
This article covers report bursting with Subscribe to email and compares it with BI Helper.
To learn how report bursting using Power Automate compares with BI Helper, see this article.
Users with Power BI licenses can subscribe to reports and dashboards from Power BI Service. Every subscriber needs a Power BI Pro ($14 per month per user), Premium Per User ($24) or Premium capacity/ Fabric (starts at $4,995 per month) license.
Premium Per User or Premium/ Fabric licensees receive the complete Power BI report as a multi-page PDF or Power Point attachment to their email. However, external subscribers (e.g., customers and vendors) need Premium capacity/ Fabric licensing to be subscribed to email.
Power BI Pro users only get one selected report page embedded in an email along with a link to the report URL in Power BI Service. This works for simple cases when users need to view a single page of a report with a common information set. It fails when report recipients need personalized versions filtered for them.
For personalized reports, the Power BI report needs to be saved multiple times with different filter values and individually subscribed for each recipient. Further, Power BI allows only 24 subscriptions per report. Besides being a tedious and error-prone manual process, this limit is a serious constraint even for low volume reporting.
For details on Subscribe to email, see this Microsoft Learn article.
BI Helper is a browser-based application which generates and distributes PDF and Power Point reports from Power BI. It is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant and supports scheduled and on-demand report delivery.
BI Helper is integrated with Power BI and delivers multi-page PDF/ PPTX files as email attachments to internal and external users. Report recipients do not need Power BI licenses, making it highly cost-effective. The report sender needs one Power BI Pro license at $14 per month, and a BI Helper plan starting at $50 per month. There is no restriction on the number of recipients.
BI Helper is easy to use, and scales from a handful of reports to enterprise volumes of 1,000 PDF/ PPTX per hour. Advanced features include email authentication, secure access, automated filter input and workflow automation.
In the BI Helper Standard plan, filter values and recipient email IDs can be uploaded to BI Helper in an Excel file, making the process fast and error-free. See this tutorial for details of manual filter and slicer input.
In the Premium and Enterprise plans, BI Helper offers automated filter and slicer input, where it reads the latest values and email IDs directly from power BI before every job run. With a one-time job set up and no manual input, BI Helper automatically creates and emails filtered, user-specific PDF/ PPTX reports per the defined job schedule. This is a very popular feature, used by over 50% of all PDF/ PPTX reports generated in BI Helper. See this tutorial for details of automated filter and slicer input.
Given the limitations described above, Subscribe to email is not feasible for medium and large volume report bursting, while BI Helper scales easily to support all reporting volumes from very small to enterprise scale.
While Subscribe to email may work for low volume reporting, BI Helper offers far better features and benefits. It is secure, easy to use and cost-effective.
Finally, BI Helper addresses a huge need gap by delivering filtered user-specific PDF and Power Point reports to external users with no licensing or maintenance overhead.
Learn more about BI Helper and sign up for your 7-day free trial!
