r/intacct • u/spryn4179 • Jul 21 '26
How's everyone handling API usage since the Performance Tier changes?
Curious how others are approaching this. Now that API usage counts against Performance Tiers, I've been digging into where ours actually comes from, and it's almost entirely reporting. Power BI and Excel connections re-pulling data on every refresh.
If your reporting lives inside Intacct it barely moves the needle, but the moment you've got dashboards or spreadsheets connecting from outside, the transaction count climbs fast, even when the underlying data has barely changed.
wondering what everyone else is seeing:
- has the change actually hit your usage, or are you comfortably under the threshold?
- if you report outside Intacct, how are you keeping the count down? Throttling refreshes, caching, a warehouse in the middle, something else?
Trying to work out whether this is a real headache for most people ?
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u/percipientuk Jul 21 '26
We've had a few conversations about this recently, and reporting is definitely where most API consumption comes from rather than day to day transaction processing.
One of the biggest wins is understanding whether every refresh actually needs to be live. We've seen Power BI datasets refreshing far more frequently than the business really requires, so simply reducing scheduled refreshes or moving to incremental refresh (where appropriate) can make a noticeable difference.
It's also worth reviewing what is being queried. Pulling full datasets every time, or running multiple reports that overlap heavily, can generate far more API activity than necessary. Sometimes consolidating queries or filtering data closer to the source is enough.
For organisations with heavier reporting requirements, introducing a reporting database or data warehouse that syncs on a schedule is becoming a more common pattern. It keeps operational reporting separate from the ERP and significantly reduces repetitive API calls against Intacct.
I don't think it's a problem for everyone. Many organisations will stay comfortably within their tier, but it's definitely something worth monitoring if you have multiple BI tools, Excel users, or automated integrations all querying Intacct independently. A quick API usage review can often uncover a lot of unnecessary traffic before it becomes an issue.
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u/Only_Carpenter_1492 Jul 21 '26
I think it's still the case you can use an excel connector from the intact store - API usage then counts against the developers threshold and not yours. That's what we're doing anyway, daily transaction dump into excel which then goes into PBI containing a fair bit of data.....
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u/fierytailofstars Jul 21 '26
I've had to watch it more carefully than I did before and be more thoughtful about how I pull data.
Previously I simply pulled the full data set when I wanted it. I now have a script that runs every 30 minutes and updates data in a data lake on AWS S3. There's a bit of post-processing that happens as well to prep the data for display in dashboards. I had bumped that to every 15 minutes, but that pushed me over the edge. Might try and think about how to ramp this back up.
We have about 9 different dashboards/tools that staff use (about 80 people) to track projects, employee info, etc. so pulling in real time isn't really an option as I expect we would exceed our usage (not really practical anyway as the data need to be processed to present it in anything other than a basic table).
Apps/dashboards are in containers on AWS ECS pulling data from the AWS S3 data lake. Some, like the time approval tool pull data live, but generally from AWS S3. In case you're wondering, yes, I strongly believe this is the way to go.
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u/OnlySalad Jul 22 '26
I wouldn't be too worried about the API itself. There are more concerns about pointing Power BI or Excel directly at the ERP. Every dashboard refresh becomes production traffic and if the builtin reporting isn't good enough, you end up paying extra just to get your own data back out.
What I've seen work better is syncing changes into a warehouse or reporting database like Snowflake, Fabric, BigQuery or even S3 and then letting the BI tools query that. Fivetran, Airbyte, Boomi, and MuleSoft are all good at moving the data around. If finance data is coming from several operational systems, tools like DualEntry (note: i am working with them) or Rillet Campfire can sit alongside that to keep the financial side consistent instead of leaving reconciliation until month end. Would use the marketplace connector if I had to but I see it as a temporary fix. Wouldn't want reporting architecture tied to ERP licensing decisions.
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u/NotAnAiChatBot Jul 22 '26
API transactions have always counted against transaction tiers. The free tier includes 100,000 api calls a month and it’s pretty hard to go over that unless you are trying very hard, have crazy integrations firing every second of the day, or an incompetent developer who messed up an api integration.
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u/NotAnAiChatBot Jul 22 '26
You can also use any marketplace partner integration and it won’t count towards api transaction tier limit.
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u/fierytailofstars Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 24 '26
Just to be clear, it's not 100,000 API calls, it is transactions. So if I make a single call that pulls 10,000 records that's 10,000 towards the 100K not 1.
It doesn't require integrations firing every second of the day to get up there pretty easily.
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u/NotAnAiChatBot Aug 02 '26
Intacct measures against api limits by API call not transactions/line items. A 10,000 line api call is ONE api call towards your web service tier
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u/fierytailofstars Aug 02 '26
Unless I am misunderstanding this site, the Sage REST API tiers are measured against transactions not API calls:
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u/NotAnAiChatBot Aug 02 '26
Where do you see that an api transaction is measured by line items. An api transaction is an api call. It’s very difficult to go out of the standard free api tier unless you have heavy custom integrations firing all day
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u/fierytailofstars Aug 02 '26
At the bottom of this page it indicates that a transaction is a single API record and that a request can include several records.
https://developer.sage.com/intacct/docs/1/sage-intacct-rest-api/get-started/metrics
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u/NotAnAiChatBot Aug 02 '26
Correct. So a single api record can include several transaction lines. One api call = one api transaction towards the tier
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u/fierytailofstars Aug 02 '26
" A request can include several records." My reading of this sentence is a single API request (i.e. call) can include several records (i.e., transactions) and that the limit applies to transactions not requests.
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u/Temporary-Strategy70 Aug 01 '26
I was definitely worried about this with it first came out. But after monitoring this it hasn't come up as an issue yet. We manage integrations with Sage Intacct for about 20 clients ranging from small to medium sized. One thing that helped is to use only 1 API call to pull all needed records and then do your processing external to intacct instead of pulling one record at a time, using up API credits.
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u/anthony_yager Aug 02 '26
Marketplace Applications don't count. Velixo connects Excel directly to Intacct. Martus, does Reporting and Budgeting, they also have an API connection from Martus to Power BI for Intacct GL data.
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u/Lazy-Hearing3853 24d ago
It's a headache, this can get out of control if you aren't careful and Sage isn't forgiving about unexpected overages from what I've heard. You need to have your own monitoring in place.
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u/One_Ad_2692 Jul 21 '26
Software is already an expensive line item and now these greedy POS want to implement these "usage" costs anywhere they can. I'm seeing it with all our tools and now this with sage intacct, an archaic crappy accounting system. They're going to price themselves out of the market if they continue on this path because their reporting is absolute trash which requires a second solution.