Best Practices Q - which account to use for PowerBI schedule refresh (not individual user accounts)

[Anonymous]

Hi,

As far as the current experience with PowerBI in the company, each employee is using their own individual office 365 account to develop and run scheduled refreshes in PowerBI.

This is OK until the password for that individual expires or due to any reason the account is disabled. Then all refreshes falls apart in PowerBI. And if the specified user is not around then data will be out of wack until someone looks into it. (As a broader conversation  with MS Flow too) but lets focus on PowerBI for now.

We thought about creating a service account, which is simply just another account for an imaginary person in Office 365 suite with no expiry date. The idea was to use this account to schedule data refreshes across all PowerBI reports.

I had a push back from IT since this imaginary license costs money. 

Is there a best practice out there that explains what account could be used to run scheduled PowerBI refreshes?

Thanks,

Usher 

[v-yuta-msft · Accepted solution]

@Anonymous ,

You don't have to use O365 account as power bi accout. You can create a power bi free account separately using business mailbox because chedule refresh doesn't need pro license.

Reference:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/refresh-scheduled-refresh

Community Support Team _ Jimmy Tao

If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[Anonymous]

@v-yuta-msft 

Thanks for the response.

Are you suggesting to create a free account using the email address at company domain? (eg. user@companydomain.com)

if yes, how does this account access company related secured data? eg, data files on company sharepoint etc?

Usher