Invoiced to Superset

This page provides you with instructions on how to extract data from Invoiced and analyze it in Superset. (If the mechanics of extracting data from Invoiced seem too complex or difficult to maintain, check out Stitch, which can do all the heavy lifting for you in just a few clicks.)

What is Invoiced?

Invoiced provides accounts receivable automation software that helps companies get paid faster, waste less time on collections, and provide a better customer experience. It automates billing tasks like sending out invoices, following up with late-paying customers, and reconciling incoming invoice payments. It also help businesses handle recurring billing and payment plans.

What is Superset?

Apache Superset is a cloud-native data exploration and visualization platform that businesses can use to create business intelligence reports and dashboards. It includes a state-of-the-art SQL IDE, and it's open source software, free of cost. The platform was originally developed at Airbnb and donated to the Apache Software Foundation.

Getting data out of Invoiced

Invoiced provides an API that lets developers get at customer, payment, invoicing, and other information stored in the platform. For example, to get information about a particular invoice, you would call GET /invoices/:{id}.

Sample Invoiced data

Here's an example of the kind of response you might see with a query like the one above.

{
  "id": 46225,
  "object": "invoice",
  "customer": 15444,
  "name": null,
  "currency": "usd",
  "draft": false,
  "closed": false,
  "paid": false,
  "status": "not_sent",
  "autopay": false,
  "attempt_count": 0,
  "next_payment_attempt": null,
  "subscription": null,
  "number": "INV-0016",
  "date": 1416290400,
  "due_date": 1417500000,
  "payment_terms": "NET 14",
  "items": [
    {
      "id": 7,
      "object": "line_item",
      "catalog_item": null,
      "type": "product",
      "name": "Copy Paper, Case",
      "description": null,
      "quantity": 1,
      "unit_cost": 45,
      "amount": 45,
      "discountable": true,
      "discounts": [],
      "taxable": true,
      "taxes": [],
      "metadata": {}
    },
    {
      "id": 8,
      "object": "line_item",
      "catalog_item": "delivery",
      "type": "service",
      "name": "Delivery",
      "description": null,
      "quantity": 1,
      "unit_cost": 10,
      "amount": 10,
      "discountable": true,
      "discounts": [],
      "taxable": true,
      "taxes": [],
      "metadata": {}
    }
  ],
  "notes": null,
  "subtotal": 55,
  "discounts": [],
  "taxes": [
    {
      "id": 20554,
      "object": "tax",
      "amount": 3.85,
      "tax_rate": null
    }
  ],
  "total": 51.15,
  "balance": 51.15,
  "url": "https://dundermifflin.invoiced.com/invoices/IZmXbVOPyvfD3GPBmyd6FwXY",
  "payment_url": "https://dundermifflin.invoiced.com/invoices/IZmXbVOPyvfD3GPBmyd6FwXY/payment",
  "pdf_url": "https://dundermifflin.invoiced.com/invoices/IZmXbVOPyvfD3GPBmyd6FwXY/pdf",
  "created_at": 1415229884,
  "metadata": {}
}

Preparing Invoiced data

If you don't already have a data structure in which to store the data you retrieve, you'll have to create a schema for your data tables. Then, for each value in the response, you'll need to identify a predefined datatype (INTEGER, DATETIME, etc.) and build a table that can receive them. Invoiced's documentation should tell you what fields are provided by each endpoint, along with their corresponding datatypes.

Complicating things is the fact that the records retrieved from the source may not always be "flat" – some of the objects may actually be lists. In these cases you'll likely have to create additional tables to capture the unpredictable cardinality in each record.

Loading data into Superset

You must replicate data from your SaaS applications to a data warehouse before you can report on it using Superset. Superset can connect to almost 30 databases and data warehouses. Once you choose a data source you want to connect to, you must specify a host name and port, database name, and username and password to get access to the data. You then specify the database schema or tables you want to work with.

Keeping Invoiced data up to date

At this point you've coded up a script or written a program to get the data you want and successfully moved it into your data warehouse. But how will you load new or updated data? It's not a good idea to replicate all of your data each time you have updated records. That process would be painfully slow and resource-intensive.

The key is to build your script in such a way that it can identify incremental updates to your data. Thankfully, Invoiced's API results include fields like created_at that allow you to identify records that are new since your last update (or since the newest record you've copied). Once you've take new data into account, you can set your script up as a cron job or continuous loop to keep pulling down new data as it appears.

From Invoiced to your data warehouse: An easier solution

As mentioned earlier, the best practice for analyzing Invoiced data in Superset is to store that data inside a data warehousing platform alongside data from your other databases and third-party sources. You can find instructions for doing these extractions for leading warehouses on our sister sites Invoiced to Redshift, Invoiced to BigQuery, Invoiced to Azure Synapse Analytics, Invoiced to PostgreSQL, Invoiced to Panoply, and Invoiced to Snowflake.

Easier yet, however, is using a solution that does all that work for you. Products like Stitch were built to move data automatically, making it easy to integrate Invoiced with Superset. With just a few clicks, Stitch starts extracting your Invoiced data, structuring it in a way that's optimized for analysis, and inserting that data into a data warehouse that can be easily accessed and analyzed by Superset.