TOPdesk dashboard: Excel, Power BI or hosted

You want a TOPdesk dashboard showing open incidents, SLA performance, resolution time and the team’s workload. The data is already in TOPdesk, so you have to decide how to get it out. TOPdesk has its own dashboards and a reporting module, and they handle most standard questions. If your question goes further, there are three routes. They differ mainly in how much time they cost you, and less in what they show.

AureaDesk is the third route, so keep that in mind as you read on. The first two are described as they are, including where they do the job better.

The questions a dashboard should answer

Before picking tools, write down the questions that keep coming back. For almost every team, they are the same four.

The first is how much work is open and whether that number is heading the right way. The second is whether you meet your SLAs and, if not, where you miss them. The other two are where work gets stuck and how the work is spread across the team.

If you can answer those four without first spending an afternoon on exports, you have a working dashboard, and everything else is secondary.

Route 1: exporting to Excel

From TOPdesk you export a list to Excel, and for a single question that is the fastest way. You filter the list, export it and build a pivot table.

Excel is less suited to questions that keep coming back. Next month you run the same export again and find that someone has renamed a category. Your pivot table is now wrong, and you spend an hour working out where it went wrong.

An export also only shows the situation at the moment you made it. If someone in a meeting wants to see which incidents are behind a figure, you cannot drill down. You can only say you will look into it, and the answer then has to wait until the next meeting. For an audit or a one-off analysis, though, Excel works very well.

Route 2: Power BI on the TOPdesk API

Many of the TOPdesk dashboards you come across are Power BI reports. You load the data through the API into a data model and build the visuals on top of it. Technically you can do anything this way, and you can combine TOPdesk figures with data from other systems, which is a real advantage.

When people estimate the cost, though, they often count only the licences. Build time and maintenance come on top of that.

According to Microsoft, Power BI Pro costs €12.10 per user per month, excl. VAT and billed annually (as of 24 September 2026), and everyone who wants to view the report needs a licence. BI licence prices fluctuate, so in a few months the same licence may cost more. You can avoid per-user licences by buying capacity, but only from the Fabric F64 size up, and that costs many times what a small team pays for Pro licences.

Estimates often go wrong on build time. A TOPdesk report you would be comfortable showing takes more than an afternoon. You need a data model with the relationships between incidents, changes and operators, and you have to decide what to do with empty fields and with categories someone archived three years ago. Allow for dozens of hours, and considerably more if this is your first time working with that API.

Maintenance tends to be forgotten altogether. A report can break when someone renames a field or an operator group is added. If a TOPdesk update changes fields, the report has to be adjusted. The OData feed, the route TOPdesk itself describes for BI tools, also gets new versions. According to TOPdesk’s documentation, the old version is normally supported for about six months after that. When you switch to the new version, existing reports may stop working, and then you have to recreate them.

If the person who built or maintains the report leaves, their knowledge goes with them and someone else has to take the report over. If nobody can, you end up with a report that nobody dares to change any more.

Building it yourself is worth the investment when you really need to combine TOPdesk with other sources or already have a BI team that maintains models like this. The same goes for a question so specific that no product covers it.

Route 3: a hosted environment

The third route is a ready-made environment that you connect to your TOPdesk API. After the connection has been set up, you sign in and the dashboard is there. You do not need a BI licence or a data model, and nobody on your side has to maintain it.

You do give up flexibility, because you work with what the environment offers. For the four questions above that is rarely a problem, but if your organisation has its own definition of resolution time that nobody else uses, you may run into its limits. In return you save time, and you no longer depend on the one colleague who “looks after the report”.

What it really costs

Compare the total cost over three years rather than licence prices. Take a team of five people who use the dashboard.

With Excel you pay nothing on top of TOPdesk, but allow half a day a month to put it together. At an internal rate of €60 an hour, that comes to just over €8,600 over three years. Because that time never appears as a separate cost, Excel feels free.

With Power BI you add up licences, the build and maintenance. Licences come to roughly €2,200 over three years at today’s price. The build takes forty to eighty hours, which at an external rate of around €100 an hour comes to €4,000 to €8,000. Add maintenance, say one to two days a year at the same rate, and you end up between €8,500 and €15,000. If reports have to be recreated after a new OData version, or a successor has to get up to speed, that can add more hours.

A hosted environment costs a fixed amount per month. For five users at AureaDesk, that is the Standard package with ten users included, €300 per month excl. VAT. Over three years that comes to €10,800, before any annual indexation.

The numbers vary from case to case, and in this example they are of the same order of magnitude. So also compare how predictable the amounts are. With Excel the cost is in your own hours. A Power BI report is expensive to build and only pays off if you actually use that flexibility. Its cost over three years also moves with the licence price and with TOPdesk updates, and depends on who maintains the report. A hosted environment has a predictable cost, but you work within the limits of what it offers.

How to choose

Two questions decide it. Do you need something an off-the-shelf product cannot do? And do you have someone who will still be maintaining it in three years?

If both answers are no, building takes more effort for the same result, and the maintenance stays with you. If you answer yes to both, Power BI is the route to take. If the answers differ, start with a hosted environment. You can still build later if you run into limits. The other way around is possible too, but then the build hours are already in a report you may want to get rid of.