SAP Business One and Looker integration

What moves between them

SAP Business One financial and inventory records flow into Looker via a warehouse as the intermediary. ml-connector polls invoices, purchase invoices, purchase orders, journal entries, incoming and outgoing payments, items, and chart of accounts from SAP Business One at a cadence you set (typically daily or weekly), transforms them to a normalized schema, loads them into your warehouse, and Looker models and analyzes them. The flow is read-only from SAP Business One into the warehouse and dashboard; no data flows back from Looker into SAP Business One.

How ml-connector handles it

ml-connector accepts the customer-specific SAP Business One Service Layer URL from your instance and uses session token authentication (reusing the same session across multiple calls to avoid the 5-second cold-start penalty on each login). It polls on a schedule using OData filters ($filter=UpdateDate gt...) to fetch only changed records since the last run, handles session token timeout errors by logging in again, and respects the default 20-record page size with $skip/$top for pagination. On the Looker side, ml-connector authenticates once per hour using the OAuth2 client credentials, caches the bearer token for subsequent calls, and refreshes it when expiry approaches. GL accounts and cost centers from SAP Business One are mapped to warehouse dimensions so Looker dashboards can slice revenue and cost by profit center. SAP Business One uses self-signed TLS certificates in many on-premise deployments; ml-connector is configured to accept them per customer. Retries use exponential backoff when hitting rate limits or transient errors, and every record carries a full audit trail.

A real-world example

A mid-market food distributor runs SAP Business One on-premise for purchasing, invoicing, and GL accounting across three regional warehouses. The finance team needs to track gross margin by region and cost of goods by product line but currently exports invoices and GL entries to Excel each month and rebuilds margin calculations by hand. The warehouse team needs visibility into aging inventory across locations. With SAP Business One connected to Looker, invoice and cost data flows automatically into a cloud warehouse, Looker models it by region, product family, and warehouse, and the finance team uses Looker dashboards to monitor margin trends during the month instead of waiting for month-end close. The warehouse team sees inventory aging dashboards updated weekly, triggering faster decisions on slow-moving stock.

What you can do

• •Poll invoices, purchase orders, and GL journal entries from SAP Business One and load them into your warehouse on a schedule you set.
• •Map SAP Business One GL accounts and cost centers to warehouse dimensions so Looker dashboards can slice revenue and profit by business unit.
• •Handle SAP Business One session token authentication and hourly OAuth token refresh for Looker, with automatic retry on timeout.
• •Respect OData page size defaults and use UpdateDate filtering to fetch only records changed since the last run, reducing load on SAP Business One.
• •Carry a full audit trail on every record moved, with error replay if a downstream warehouse load fails.

Questions

How does ml-connector handle the 30-minute session token timeout in SAP Business One?

ml-connector detects a 5002 session timeout error, logs in again using the customer Service Layer credentials, and retries the request with the new session token. It reuses the session token across multiple API calls to avoid triggering the 5-second cold-start penalty on each request.

Does ml-connector work with on-premise SAP Business One instances?

Yes. ml-connector accepts the customer-specific Service Layer URL (e.g. https://customer-server:50001/b1s/v2/) and is configured to accept self-signed TLS certificates common in on-premise deployments. The customer must expose the Service Layer port to your network or allow ml-connector network access.

What direction does data flow between SAP Business One and Looker?

Data flows from SAP Business One into your warehouse and then into Looker for analytics and dashboards. SAP Business One is the source of truth; Looker is read-only for reporting and analysis. No financial data flows back from Looker into SAP Business One.