Connecting Cirqll to Power BI: how to build a dashboard on your Cirqll data

Why connect Cirqll to Power BI when Cirqll already has a dashboard?

Cirqll is built to organise your day-to-day sales and relationship management: customers, contacts, deals, appointments, tasks and contracts in one place. The dashboard in Cirqll shows what is happening today. For that job it works fine.

The questions a managing director or sales manager asks often go a step further. How is the pipeline developing month by month? Which sales person wins the most deals, and at which stage do customers drop out? How does what we sell compare with what we end up invoicing? To answer those, you quickly end up with an export to Excel and an afternoon of copying and pasting.

An integration between Cirqll and Power BI fetches that data automatically and keeps it up to date. You stop looking at a snapshot and start looking at trends, and you can place Cirqll data alongside other sources, such as your accounting system.

Which Cirqll data do you need for a dashboard?

Cirqll has a REST API that lets you read the main building blocks, as far as your user permissions allow. For a first sales dashboard you usually only need a few of them:

• Customers and contacts. Who your customers and prospects are, with the attributes you want to filter on, such as region or industry.
• Deals. The heart of your dashboard: the value, stage, owner and dates of every deal. Cirqll works with stages you name yourself, such as "Proposal sent" or "In negotiation". Those stages become your funnel.
• Appointments and tasks. How much customer contact there is and whether every open deal has a next step planned.
• Contracts. Useful for recurring revenue and for running agreements that are about to expire.
• Custom fields. Many companies record their own fields in Cirqll, such as a product group or lead source. In a dashboard these are often the most interesting dimension.

Exactly which tables are available depends on your Cirqll setup. On our page about the Cirqll Power BI Connector you can read which sales, account and deal data the connector fetches.

How do you connect Cirqll to Power BI?

There are roughly three routes. Which one fits depends on how much you want to build and maintain.

1. Manual export. You export lists from Cirqll and load them into Power BI. That works for a one-off analysis, but the report is out of date the moment you save it. Nobody wants to repeat that every Monday.
2. Calling the API yourself from Power BI. Power Query can query an API. You then have to handle authentication, pagination and error handling yourself, and every change to your Cirqll setup needs maintenance. For a technically strong team it is feasible, but it takes more time than you think.
3. A ready-made connector. A custom connector takes care of fetching the data for you. You connect your Cirqll environment and the tables arrive in Power BI ready to use. That is the route we offer with the Cirqll Power BI Connector, including help with installation and configuration.

With a custom connector, keep one practical point in mind: if you want the report to refresh automatically in the Power BI service, that runs through an on-premises data gateway. You set it up once. If you want to combine Cirqll data with many other sources or keep a long history, an intermediate layer with its own database can be the wiser choice. That is data engineering work.

Which numbers belong on your first Cirqll dashboard?

Start small. Five numbers are enough to base a sales meeting on.

1. Pipeline value per stage. The total value of open deals, broken down by the stages you use in Cirqll. That shows whether the funnel is healthily filled or everything is stuck in the first stage.
2. Won revenue per period. The value of won deals per month or quarter, set against your target. This is the number management looks at first.
3. Win rate. The number of won deals divided by the number of closed deals (won plus lost). Look at it per sales person and per lead source, because that is where the big differences are.
4. Deal cycle time. The average number of days between creating and closing a deal. If it goes up, something is slowing down your sales process.
5. Deals without a next step. Open deals with no appointment or task attached. This is not a trend but an action list, and in practice often the part sales people start using first.

Agree on the definitions up front. Does a deal count as lost when it is set to "lost", or also when it has been idle for three months? Choices like that decide whether your numbers can be trusted. For KPIs beyond sales, such as finance and operations, read The 10 KPIs every SME dashboard needs.

What does a Cirqll dashboard look like in practice?

A fictional example to make it concrete. Imagine a wholesaler with four account managers working in Cirqll with five deal stages. Every Monday morning the team opens one Power BI report with three pages.

• Page 1, pipeline: the value of open deals per stage, won revenue this month against target, and how the pipeline has developed over the last twelve months.
• Page 2, analysis: win rate and cycle time per account manager and per lead source, and revenue per customer, so you see where deals come from and where they get stuck.
• Page 3, actions: a list of open deals with no scheduled appointment or task, sorted by value, and this week's appointments.

The report refreshes automatically. The Monday meeting no longer starts with "where do we stand?", but with the question of why three large deals have been in the same stage for a month.

This layout resembles the Cirqll Dashboard Template that comes with our connector: a complete set of pipeline, analysis and appointment pages, with a Deal Explorer to zoom in on every deal. You can see an example with test data on the Cirqll page.

Step by step: building a Power BI dashboard on Cirqll

1. Define the questions. Which three to five decisions do you want to make better? Think: where do we spend our sales time, which deals need attention, will we hit our quarterly target? The numbers follow from that.
2. Clean up your Cirqll data. Check that deals have a value, owner and stage, and that old deals have been closed properly. A dashboard makes a mess visible, but it does not fix it.
3. Set up access. Connect through a user with the permissions you need, nothing more. Agree who may see which data in Power BI.
4. Connect and check the totals. Do the number of open deals and the pipeline value in Power BI match what you see in Cirqll? Only then do you start on the visuals.
5. Start with one page. Let the team work with it for a few weeks. Their questions decide what comes next.
6. Sort out licences. In most situations, anyone who wants to view a shared report needs a Power BI Pro licence. Read which licence fits in Power BI licensing in 2026.

Want to go beyond looking and have things happen, such as an alert when a large deal has been idle for two weeks? You add steps like that with workflow automation.

Help with your Cirqll dashboard in Power BI

Want to get started quickly without building an API integration yourself? Take a look at the Cirqll Power BI Connector and dashboard template. Want to combine Cirqll with your accounting or other systems? See what we do in dashboarding and which other integrations are available.