Point of Rental to Power BI, done for you
The build starts with the route out of the system, not the first chart: whether your POR Expert database can be read directly, whether the Global API covers your product, or whether a scheduled export is the honest answer. Then the asset register, contract lines, on-rent events and quote records are modelled so utilization, revenue per unit and pipeline all answer to one depot, one date and one definition. Fixed price from $2,500, and most builds ship in 3–5 business days.
Representative dashboard — sample data
Where POR reporting runs out
Point of Rental is not short of reports. Its enterprise product is marketed on having more than four hundred of them built in, and most rental businesses running POR Expert have added a stack of saved variants on top. What the system is short of is a model. Each report answers the question it was written for and hands back a page with headings, groups and subtotals baked into it — excellent as a report, nearly useless as a data source.
So the fleet packet gets assembled by hand. One export for the asset register, another for contracts, a third for work orders, original equipment cost from the ledger, and a workbook that stitches them together with lookups nobody wants to inherit. It holds up until the person who owns it is on vacation, or until two managers quote different utilization figures in the same meeting and both turn out to be right.
The gap is real enough that a third party built a business selling Power BI dashboards for POR Expert (opens in new tab) out of what it describes as frustration at the lack of dashboard reporting available in the product. The fix is not another saved report. It is to pull the records out once at their natural grain — units, contracts, contract lines, status events, quotes, work orders, depots — and rebuild them where every measure is defined in one place.
Reports we build from Point of Rental
Buy a block of prepaid Flex hours and, if you’re unhappy within the first 4 hours, we refund you in full — no questions asked. Hours are deducted only for work you’ve reviewed and approved, there’s no project minimum, and your banked hours never expire.
What the build covers
Each one is agreed in the scope estimate, in writing, before an hour is spent.
A read-only connection to the database behind your own install, the Global API, or a scheduled export. Which exist depends on which POR product you run and how it is hosted — and that is established, with your vendor if need be, before anything is designed around it.
Units get re-numbered, transferred between depots, converted to sales inventory and occasionally bought back. If that key drifts, lifetime revenue detaches from the machine and return per unit becomes fiction. We reconcile it during the build and document how it is maintained.
Time utilization is rented days over available days, and almost every argument about it is really an argument about the denominator. Units down for repair, in transit, or reserved but not picked up each move the number. We write the rule down once and every visual inherits it.
Dollar utilization and return per unit need original equipment cost, depreciation and net book value — and those live in the ledger, not in POR. We join them on the asset key so capital productivity is comparable across classes worth very different amounts.
Quotes raised this month, by salesperson, with the date of last contact and the value still open — the forward view the contract history cannot give you. It is the piece most hand-built fleet packets leave out, and the one that changes next month rather than explaining last month.
Each user maps to a depot or region, the model filters every visual to that scope, and head office reads the consolidated view from the same report. Roles are tested against real contracts before go-live, with documentation of who can see what.
Through a route you already own or can enable, because Power BI ships no first-party Point of Rental connector and there is no supported way to point it at the application and start querying. Three routes do the work in practice, and they are not interchangeable — they differ in how much history they carry, how often they can run, and who has to be involved to switch them on. Which ones are open to you depends on which POR product you run and how it is hosted, and that is the first thing we establish.
The product line matters more than it looks. Point of Rental’s current lineup names the enterprise system Elite, offered cloud-hosted or self-hosted, alongside Essentials and the UK Syrinx product; a great many rental businesses are still running the earlier Expert generation on their own servers, and call the whole thing POR regardless. That distinction decides your route, because the vendor’s Global API reference (opens in new tab) describes a standardised interface for Point of Rental’s rental management systems and names Elite, Essentials and Syrinx — Expert is not among the systems it names. On an Expert site, the database and the report scheduler are the realistic doors.
| Route | What it is | What it carries well | Practical limits | When we choose it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The POR database | A read-only connection to the database behind a self-hosted install — typically POR Expert, or Elite where you host it yourself — reached through the on-premises data gateway | Everything the application stores, at full history and full depth: units, contracts, contract lines, status events, quotes, work orders, rate books | Read access has to be agreed rather than assumed; the schema belongs to the application, not to a reporting model, so version upgrades can move things underneath you | Our first choice on an Expert or self-hosted site, because it is the only route that makes multi-year trend cheap to refresh |
| Point of Rental Global API | The vendor’s public REST API, authenticated with an API key, with resources including contracts, line items, customers, products, stock, depots, invoices, work orders, sales persons and call logs | Current-state reads against a cloud-hosted system, under entitlements your business controls, without anyone touching a database | Its reference names Elite, Essentials and Syrinx, not Expert; some resources are product-specific; and paging years of contract lines through a request-response API is slow work | Where the system is vendor-hosted and no database access exists — and for genuinely current reads alongside a nightly model |
| Scheduled export | The built-in report scheduler writing files to a location Power BI can reach, rather than emailing a PDF to a person | Whichever fields you can get into the export, at the cadence the scheduler runs — often already in place and already trusted by the finance team | Only works if the output is written extract-shaped: one row per record, keys rather than labels, no subtotals or group headings, or the model inherits a report’s formatting | When neither the database nor the API is available, or when a specific export already runs and nobody wants to disturb it |
| A copy someone already landed | POR data already replicated into SQL Server, Azure SQL, Microsoft Fabric or an analytics tool by a previous project or an integration | Whatever was loaded — often more than anyone remembers, and frequently already joined to the ledger | Needs its lineage and freshness verified before it is trusted; stale or partial loads are common and rarely documented | Always our first question, because it is faster to refresh and cheaper to model than starting a new extraction |
Whichever route is chosen, the landing place matters as much as the source. We put the data in a store your business owns — typically SQL Server or Azure SQL behind your own gateway — rather than inside a report file on somebody’s laptop. That is what keeps the dashboard alive when the person who built it is unavailable, and it is what lets Microsoft’s incremental refresh (opens in new tab) process only what changed each night instead of reloading years of contract-line detail. If your data already sits in a database of your own, the same discipline is on our SQL Server Power BI dashboard page.
Seven or eight tables, most of them small. The work is not volume, it is grain: the same extract can be counted as units, as contracts, as contract lines or as rental days depending on what you join, and a fleet report that mixes those silently is how two managers end up quoting different utilization in the same meeting. Naming each table’s grain out loud, once, is what stops that.
| Table | Grain | Comes from | What it answers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Asset register | One row per serial-numbered unit, or per bulk item group | Product and stock records | Fleet size and mix, class hierarchy, age band, acquisition date, current status and home depot for every unit |
| Contract header | One row per rental contract | Contract records | Customer, depot, salesperson, start and return dates, and the split between rental, delivery, damage waiver, consumables and sales revenue |
| Contract line | One row per item per contract | Contract line items | What was on rent, at what rate, for how long — the grain that time utilization, rate achievement against book rate and revenue per unit are actually computed from |
| Status events | One row per status change per unit | On-rent and off-rent dates, transfers and service status | Idle and dwell days between contracts, split by reason, and the available-days denominator that utilization depends on |
| Quote and follow-up | One row per quote, plus one per contact attempt | Quote records and the call log | Open pipeline value, conversion rate by salesperson and class, quote ageing, and which quotes have gone quiet |
| Work order | One row per service job, with parts and labour lines beneath | Work order records | Maintenance cost against the revenue a unit earned, repeat-failure models, and downtime that should be excluded from available days |
| Depot | One row per depot or location | Depot and location codes, mapped to the GL cost centre | Every metric split the way the business actually runs, including region roll-ups maintained in one place rather than per report |
| Date | One row per day | Built, not extracted | Rental days, month and quarter ends, fiscal periods and prior-year comparisons, so every trend uses the same calendar |
Two modelling choices deserve a decision rather than a default. The first is which depot owns a contract — the one that booked it, or the one the unit physically came from. Both are defensible, they produce different scorecards, and the only wrong answer is letting each report pick its own. The second is whether reserved-but-not-collected days count as available. We pick with you, and the choice goes in the documentation rather than in somebody’s head.
One field the model will not find in Point of Rental is original equipment cost as finance carries it, with depreciation and net book value alongside. That comes from the ledger and joins on the asset key, which is a short piece of work and always a conversation about the chart of accounts rather than a technical one. The modelling discipline underneath all of this is the same one described on our Power BI data modeling and DAX page.
Nightly suits most rental fleets. Contracts open and close through the day, units come back onto the yard, work orders get raised, and almost every question the fleet packet answers is a daily one rather than an intraday one. We schedule the refresh to run after your close-of-day routine and stamp the as-of date and time on every page, because the fastest way to lose a manager’s trust is for someone to read a 9am figure as if it were live.
Because a self-hosted POR database sits behind your firewall, the refresh runs through Microsoft’s on-premises data gateway (opens in new tab), which we help your IT team stand up if it is not already there. From there the dataset publishes to your own Power BI workspace on a schedule that matches your batch window. Where a genuinely current figure is needed — what is on the yard right now, before a driver is dispatched — that is the narrow case the Global API is built for, and we scope it separately rather than pretending a nightly model can do it.
Through row-level security in the model, not through which file someone was sent. Each user account maps to a depot or region and every visual filters to that scope automatically, while the owner and CFO read the consolidated view from the same report. It matters in a multi-branch rental business for an ordinary commercial reason: rate achievement and customer detail travel further than anyone intends once a spreadsheet leaves the building.
We configure the roles, test them against real contracts before go-live, and document who can see what. The mechanics, including how roles and DAX filters interact, are walked through step by step in our guide to Power BI row-level security setup.
Point of Rental answers what was rented, to whom, at what rate and what it cost to fix. It does not answer what the unit cost to buy or what it is worth now — that is the ledger. It does not answer engine hours or where a machine physically is — that is telematics, and on a mixed fleet the practical route is a provider API or the AEMP / ISO 15143-3 feed rather than six vendor portals. Delivery cost often sits partly in dispatch and partly in fuel cards.
Each of those is named in the scope estimate, with the ones in scope separated from the ones that are not, so nothing is quietly assumed. Vendors in this market do publish their own analytics — Point of Rental markets a Power BI offering for its Syrinx product (opens in new tab) spanning hires, invoices, workshop and sales, and Rental360 publishes dashboards built on ARA-certified rental metrics (opens in new tab) covering time and dollar utilization, revenue and asset value against age. Where one of those already fits your product and answers your questions, we will say so. What we build is for the case they do not cover: your POR data joined to your ledger, your telematics and your definitions, in a workspace you own.
You buy prepaid Flex hours that never expire: Starter is 20 hours at $125/hr ($2,500), Growth is 40 hours at $115/hr ($4,600), and Power is 80 hours at $100/hr ($8,000). Hourly work starts from $100/hr. A first Point of Rental build — one extraction route, the asset, contract, line, event and work-order tables, depot and date dimensions, and a utilization, revenue and pipeline report set — usually fits inside the Starter block, and most ship in 3–5 business days once the scope estimate is approved.
Work that reaches beyond POR tends to move a business to the second tier: ledger reconciliation for true dollar utilization, telematics for run-hour-based maintenance, or rebuilding years of status history so idle days can be read as of a past date. There is no project minimum and no retainer — you refill only when you want more, and hours are deducted only for work you have reviewed and approved. See how prepaid Flex hours work for the published tiers.
Rental businesses running Point of Rental with anywhere from one yard to a few dozen depots, where the fleet packet is assembled by hand each month and the asset register and the ledger have never quite agreed. It fits owners and CFOs who want one set of numbers, fleet and operations directors who need the detail underneath them, and the one person who currently owns the workbook everybody depends on.
If your question is which numbers a rental business should be reading in the first place — how time and dollar utilization differ, what belongs on a depot scorecard, how return per unit is defined — start with our Power BI for equipment rental companies page. That one owns the metrics; this one is deliberately about getting the data out of Point of Rental, and the two are built to be read together.
Two things we scope explicitly rather than assume. We do not administer or upgrade your rental system, and we do not write back to it — this is read-only management reporting alongside POR, not a replacement for it. And we work only with access your own agreement already permits: your business owns the credentials, grants read-only access, and can revoke it at any time without touching the model. Contact is form-only — send your request and we reply with a scope estimate.
business days, typical
fixed-price first build
own everything
Bank hours once and spend them as the questions change. See Flex pricing →
How it works
We confirm which POR product you run, how it is hosted and which route it allows — database, Global API, scheduled export or a copy already landed — and in parallel agree the definitions: what an available day is, which depot owns a contract, how far back usable history goes. You get a scope and hours estimate before any work begins.
A senior US-based engineer builds the scheduled extraction, lands it in a store your business owns, and rebuilds the asset, contract, line, status, quote and work-order records into a star schema with depot and date dimensions — then reconciles every total against a POR report your team already runs.
Published to your Power BI workspace with refresh scheduled after close of day, incremental where history is long, row-level security so each manager sees only their depot, and documentation you keep. We maintain it from your banked hours, and you can revoke our access without touching the model.
Representative perspective
We had four hundred reports and still built the monthly fleet pack in a spreadsheet. Having the contract lines and the asset register modelled once means the answer is a slicer now, and nobody argues about whose utilization number is the real one.Owner, regional equipment rental business
Representative perspective
The thing I did not expect to matter was writing down what counts as an available day. Two depots had been measuring it differently for years, and putting one definition in the model ended the argument in an afternoon.Fleet director, multi-depot rental company
Tell us which Point of Rental product you run, how many depots you operate, and what the monthly pack has to show. We’ll confirm the route and the definitions, then tell you the hours before any work begins — drawn from prepaid Flex hours that never expire, with no project minimums and no obligation.
FAQ
Through a route you already own, because Power BI ships no first-party Point of Rental connector. Three paths do the work: a read-only connection to the POR database behind your own install, the Point of Rental Global API, or a scheduled export from the built-in report scheduler. Which of them are available depends on your product and your agreement.
Not by name. The Global API reference describes a standardised interface for Point of Rental’s rental management systems and names Elite, Essentials and Syrinx; Expert is not among the systems it names. So on an Expert site we normally read the database through the on-premises data gateway, or fall back to a scheduled export.
Usually because time utilization and dollar utilization answer different questions, and because the available-days denominator is rarely written down. One report excludes units down for repair, another counts them. We agree the denominator once, implement it as a governed measure, and every page inherits it instead of re-deriving it.
Nightly suits most rental fleets, because contracts, off-rent events and work orders settle through the day and the questions are daily ones. We schedule the refresh after your close-of-day routine and stamp the as-of time on every page. Where a live yard status is genuinely needed, that is an API job scoped separately.
Yes, through row-level security in the model rather than through which file someone was sent. Each user maps to a depot or region and every visual filters to that scope automatically, while head office reads the consolidated view from the same report. We configure the roles and test them before go-live.
No, and it usually shortens the queue. Operational output stays where it belongs: pick lists, contracts, invoices and service tickets. What moves is the standing management reporting — the monthly fleet packet, the depot scorecards, the quote follow-up chase — which becomes one refreshing model where a new question is a slicer.
No. We are an independent US-based Power BI consultancy with no Point of Rental partnership to claim and no prebuilt connector to sell. We work with whatever access your own agreement already permits, your business owns the credentials, and everything we build is published into your own Power BI workspace.
The metric side of this build — which fleet, depot and per-unit numbers belong in front of an owner, and how each one is defined — is covered on our Power BI for equipment rental companies page, which is the companion to this one. If the POR database is already replicated into a server of your own, the build starts from there instead, as described on our SQL Server Power BI dashboard page. Getting each depot manager into the same report without exposing another yard’s customers is a row-level security job, walked through in Power BI row-level security setup. Every task is scoped before work begins from your prepaid block of senior-led hours — no project minimums, no change-order surprises, and hours are deducted only for work you approve.
Book a free demo
Tell us the task. We scope it, you approve, and a senior consultant delivers — typically in 3–5 business days. Prepaid hours that never expire.
The fastest way to reach us is the form — tell us the task and we'll reply within one business day.