Rock’s Process BI Analytics job keeps the data that the BI tool uses up to date. The job is located in the Jobs Administration screen (Admin Tools > System Settings > Jobs Administration). While the job ships with Rock, you need to schedule it and run it at least once for the data to be available. (If you open your BI tools and don’t see any data, this is why.)

Let’s take a look at the BI job settings and what each does.

The BI job runs a number of processes, including:

• Process Person BI Analytics – Keeps person tables up to date and processes historical data.
• Process Family BI Analytics – Keeps family tables up to date and processes historical data.
• Process Campus BI Analytics – Keeps campus information in sync.
• Process Financial Transaction BI Analytics – Processes financial transactions and adds any new transactions.
• Process Attendance BI Analytics – Updates attendance data.
• Refresh Power BI Account Tokens – Keeps account tokens from expiring.
• Process Giving Unit BI Analytics - Updates giving unit data.

Account tokens must be refreshed every two weeks, otherwise they expire. If you view a report, the tokens are automatically refreshed. If you go more than two weeks without viewing a report, though, the BI job will refresh the tokens for you to keep them from expiring.

Now let's look at how you can customize the BI job by enabling and disabling these settings.

Enabling and Disabling BI Job Settings

You may wonder why you’d want to disable the BI job settings since they keep your data up to date. There are some valid reasons for disabling certain settings, though, such as if you decide not to use Power BI.

Keep in mind that the BI tables are only updated when the job runs; so, the tables aren’t 100% up-to-date every minute. You may want to update some data more often than others, running the analytics, say, four times a day as opposed to only once a day. For example, if you want to process person analytics more often than the others, you could disable the Process Person BI Analytics setting and create a separate Process BI Analytics job that runs the person analytics more often, separately from other analytics.

So, you can create multiple versions of the job to run different schedules. This gives you a lot of flexibility when it comes to processing data in a way that’s most useful to your organization.