TOPdesk dashboard: Excel, Power BI or hosted

You want a dashboard on TOPdesk. Open incidents, SLA, resolution time, how hard the team is being pushed. All of that is possible, because the data is already in there. The question is how you get at it, and there are three routes. They differ less in what they end up showing than in how many evenings they cost you.

AureaDesk is that third one. You know that now, so you can read the rest with the right glasses on. The first two are described here as they are, including where they do it better.

First: what should the thing actually answer?

Before picking tools, it helps to write down which questions you are tired of. For almost every team, they are the same four.

How much work is there right now, and is it moving the right way? Are we meeting our agreements, and if not, where exactly? Where does work get stuck? And can the team keep this up?

If you can answer those four without exporting anything first, you have a working dashboard. The rest is decoration.

Route 1: exporting to Excel

TOPdesk exports to Excel just fine, and for a single question that is simply the fastest way. Filter, export, pivot table, done.

It falls apart on repetition. Next month the same export has to be made again with exactly the same filters, and then it turns out someone renamed a category. Now your pivot table is wrong and you spend an hour working out where it went sideways. Most teams keep that up for about six months.

And there is something else that grates: an export is a photo of yesterday. When someone in a meeting asks "which incidents are those, then?", you cannot click through. You can only say you will look into it, which is exactly the answer nobody can use.

For an audit or a one-off analysis, Excel is excellent. Just do not turn it into a monthly ritual.

Route 2: Power BI on the TOPdesk API

Most TOPdesk dashboards you meet in the wild are Power BI reports. You pull the data in through the API, build a data model and put visuals on top. Technically you can do anything this way, and you can put TOPdesk figures next to data from other systems. That is a genuine advantage.

The bill arrives in three places, though, and usually only one gets counted.

The licence is the visible one. Power BI Pro runs at about $14 per user per month in 2026, and everyone who wants to look at the report needs one. Buying capacity instead gets you out of that, but starts at a few hundred dollars a month.

The build time is the underestimated one. A TOPdesk report you dare to show is not something you make on a Friday afternoon. The data model, the relationships between incidents and changes and operators, what you do with empty fields and with categories somebody archived three years ago. Count on dozens of hours, and considerably more if this is your first time touching that API.

Maintenance is the forgotten one. Reports break. Someone renames a field, an operator group is added, TOPdesk ships an update. And one day the person who built it leaves and there is a report nobody dares to touch any more. That is not theory; it happens regularly.

Build this if you genuinely need to combine TOPdesk with other sources, if there is already a BI team around that maintains this kind of model, or if your question is so specific that no product covers it. In those cases it is worth it.

Route 3: a hosted environment

The third route is an environment that is already finished and that you connect to your TOPdesk API. Sign in and it is there. No BI licence, no data model, and nobody on your side maintaining it.

What you give up is flexibility. You get what is in it. For those four questions above that is rarely a problem, but if your organisation has its own definition of resolution time that nobody else uses, it can pinch.

What you get back is time, and the disappearance of a dependency. There is no longer anyone who "manages the report".

What it really costs

Do not compare licence prices, compare total cost over three years. Take a team of five people who look at it.

With Excel you pay nothing on top of TOPdesk, but count half a day a month for putting it together. At an internal rate of sixty euros an hour that is around eight thousand euros over three years. It just never appears as a cost line, which is why Excel feels free.

With Power BI you pay roughly €2,400 in licences over three years, plus the build. Forty to eighty hours, which externally means four to eight thousand euros. Plus maintenance. Realistically you land somewhere between eight and fourteen thousand.

A hosted environment costs a fixed amount per month, usually between one and four hundred euros for an organisation this size. Over three years that is €3,600 to €14,400, and then you are done.

The numbers vary by situation, but the shape is the same everywhere. Excel looks free and is not. Power BI is expensive to build and only pays off if you actually use that flexibility. Hosted is predictable but bounded.

So how do you choose?

Two things decide it, really. 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 the answer is no twice, building is an expensive way to get the same thing. Yes twice, and Power BI is your route. Somewhere in between, start hosted. If you hit limits later you can still build, and that order is a lot cheaper than the other way round, because a half-finished Power BI report you want to get rid of costs you more than a subscription you cancel.