Adobe Commerce Intelligence, Looker Studio and Power BI

It's Monday, and the meeting has three numbers for last week's sales: one from the store's Admin, one from web analytics and one from the ERP. None of them match, and the meeting goes to figuring out which one is right. It's rarely a tool problem: nobody defined what counts as a sale, in which currency, with or without tax, in which time zone, and what happens with returns.

Business intelligence (BI) for Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento) means turning the store's commercial data —orders, invoices, returns, customers, inventory— and the ERP's into reliable reports for decisions. The options have changed: Adobe marks Advanced Reporting and Adobe Commerce Intelligence as PaaS-only (Adobe's cloud or on-premises), the SaaS version integrates through APIs and events, and in April 2026 Google renamed Looker Studio to Data Studio.

At WolfSellers we implement Adobe Commerce and connect its data to the ERP and to BI tools. Here we compare the reporting and BI options, from the Admin to Looker Studio or Power BI, which KPIs to track and how to build a model that reconciles with finance. Our examples come from Mexico, where we're based, but the logic applies just as well to stores in the US and Canada. For the broader picture, see our guide to ecommerce in Mexico.

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What Adobe Commerce Intelligence is (formerly Magento Business Intelligence)

Adobe Commerce Intelligence, formerly Magento Business Intelligence (MBI), is Adobe's cloud analytics platform for Adobe Commerce. It replicates data from the store and other sources into a data warehouse managed by Adobe, where you can model metrics, build reports and share dashboards. Adobe positions it as the way to keep a single source of truth.

According to its documentation, these are its pieces:

1. Integrations. The Adobe Commerce database and other MySQL, Microsoft SQL, MongoDB or PostgreSQL databases; services such as Google Ads, Salesforce or Zendesk; CSV files; and an import API.
2. Data Warehouse Manager. Chooses which tables and columns sync and creates calculated columns.
3. Visual Report Builder. Reports without SQL, built from predefined metrics.
4. SQL Report Builder. SQL queries against the data warehouse, turned into charts; useful for one-to-many relationships, such as a product that belongs to several categories.
5. Cohorts and dashboards. Standard dashboards for marketing ROI, customer lifetime value, segmentation, executive KPIs, cohorts and merchandising, which you can customize, share with user permissions and send by email.

How it's licensed. You request the account through your Adobe account team. The Adobe Commerce on Cloud product description lists it as an upgrade to the base package or as part of a bundle that already includes it. The more limited Essentials edition is no longer offered: Adobe documents it as a legacy account, without the Data Warehouse Manager or third-party integrations. Adobe quotes the license price.

Where it runs. Per that product description, it operates in a multi-tenant environment outside Adobe Commerce's managed infrastructure and isn't covered by that infrastructure's minimum uptime percentage. The Admin documentation marks it as PaaS-only: Adobe Commerce on Cloud and on-premises.

It isn't real time. It syncs with your sources throughout the day, in update cycles, and a number can change from one cycle to the next, because of new data or because an order changed status. Cycle length depends on the replication method, how often changes are rechecked and the number of dashboards.

Reports Adobe Commerce already includes: the Reports menu and Advanced Reporting

The Admin reports

The Admin's Reports menu groups predefined reports:

Sales reports can be filtered by website or store, period, dates and order status, and exported to CSV or Excel XML. They have two limits. On PaaS they use stored statistics: if you don't refresh them under Reports > Statistics > Refresh Statistics, they miss the latest data. And each report is an isolated query, with no ERP costs: it's for running the store, not for measuring margin.

Advanced Reporting

Advanced Reporting is an orders, customers and products dashboard that Adobe includes at no extra cost in Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source (we compare both in our editions comparison). It uses Commerce Intelligence technology but doesn't require an account. You open it under Reports > Business Intelligence > Advanced Reporting.

It shows revenue, orders, average order value, refunds, tax and shipping collected, coupons, sales by region, new customers and bestsellers. Its conditions:

• PaaS only, with the store on a public web server with SSL, secure URLs and cron running.
• A single base currency since installation: if you ever changed it, it won't work.
• Data is sent once a day (2:00 a.m. by default) and can take up to a day to show up.
• Adobe doesn't recommend extending it.

It works as a starter executive dashboard, with no custom metrics and no ERP data.

What about Adobe Commerce as a Cloud Service? The Admin documentation marks statistics refresh, Advanced Reporting and Commerce Intelligence as PaaS-only; the sales, products, customers and marketing reports aren't marked that way. On SaaS, deeper BI is built with the API and events covered in the next section. We compare the models in our posts on Adobe Commerce as a Cloud Service and Adobe Commerce hosting.

How to get Adobe Commerce data into Looker Studio or Power BI

Looker Studio —which Google renamed Data Studio in April 2026— and Power BI are visualization tools: they don't keep your history or settle your definitions. We recommend three layers: extraction from Adobe Commerce and the ERP, a data warehouse where metrics are modeled, and the dashboard tool on top.

GraphQL, Adobe Commerce's other API, is designed for storefronts and apps; to extract orders in bulk we use REST, with a credential limited to the resources it needs (on PaaS, an integration with Custom resource access) and without copying personal data that no dashboard uses.

Connectors. Data Studio has Google-built connectors for BigQuery, MySQL, PostgreSQL and Google Sheets, plus a gallery of third-party connectors, some of them paid. Power BI connects to MySQL, PostgreSQL, Google BigQuery and Snowflake, and has a connector for Adobe Analytics. Adobe's documentation doesn't include an official Adobe Commerce connector for either tool: the ones available come from third parties.

How it differs from Adobe Analytics and Customer Journey Analytics

Adobe Analytics and Customer Journey Analytics (CJA) measure behavior: visits, funnels, attribution and cross-channel journeys. Commerce Intelligence, or BI on top of your warehouse, measures commercial records: orders, returns, costs, margins and inventory.

Their revenue numbers won't match, and they don't need to. Comparing Google Analytics with the database, Commerce Intelligence's documentation cites tracking that isn't set up correctly, incognito visits and click events that fail, causes common to any browser-based measurement. For revenue, the store database rules; for accounting, the ERP.

The two worlds connect. If you use Adobe Experience Platform (AEP), Adobe Commerce's Data Connection extension sends it storefront events (views, cart, checkout), back-office events (order placed, order shipped) and profiles, which CJA, Adobe Analytics and Real-Time CDP then use. We also recommend recording the Adobe Commerce order number as the purchase ID in analytics, to join behavior with margin. More in our posts on Adobe Analytics, Customer Journey Analytics and ecommerce CRO.

Which reporting option fits: a decision table

In practice they're combined: the Admin for daily operations, Analytics or CJA for conversion, and Commerce Intelligence or the warehouse for the commercial and financial number. What doesn't work is each team reporting with its own definitions.

Which KPIs to track and which system each one comes from

A few well-defined KPIs, each with an owner, are worth more than dozens of reports nobody reads. Return metrics are covered in our reverse logistics guide.

How to build a reliable data model

These are the agreements we put in writing before the first dashboard:

1. What a sale is. The order placed, paid, invoiced or shipped. Adobe Commerce stores the order, invoice, shipment and credit memo as separate documents, each with its own date. Pick which one each report uses.
2. Net sales, with a formula. On the order, subtotal, tax, shipping, discounts, and canceled and refunded amounts are separate fields. In Mexico, consumer prices include tax because the law requires showing the total amount to pay (Federal Consumer Protection Law, Art. 7 Bis), so remove VAT (IVA) and shipping before calling it a sale. Where tax is added at checkout, as is common in the US and Canada, the order total carries it too.
3. Returns on two dates. By refund date, to reconcile with the ERP's credit notes (in Mexico, a CFDI e-invoice of type egreso); by original order date, to measure the return rate of a product or campaign.
4. States, not labels. Adobe Commerce separates the order state, which controls the workflow, from the status, a customizable label. Filter by state, and don't count orders pending payment: with cash vouchers —paid at OXXO convenience stores in Mexico, for example— or bank transfers, the order exists before the money does, and not all of them get paid.
5. Costs from the ERP. Adobe Commerce has a Cost field in a product's advanced pricing, but the accounting cost —for example, average cost including freight and import duties— lives in the ERP. Join sales and costs by SKU and period, as we explain in our guide to integrating Adobe Commerce with an ERP.
6. One reporting currency. Each order stores its amounts in the base currency and in the order currency. Report in the base currency.
7. Customers, not accounts. Guest buyers have no account: for repeat purchase and lifetime value, also identify customers by normalized email.
8. Reconcile at every close. Compare BI net sales with what the ERP invoiced and document the expected differences, such as orders not yet invoiced.
9. Time zone. Group by day in your business's local time, not in UTC.

Time zones: why your daily sales don't match

Adobe Commerce stores dates in UTC in the database, and the Admin displays them in the time zone configured for each website (Stores > Settings > Configuration > General > General > Locale Options). If your extraction reads dates as stored, they arrive in UTC, and grouping by day moves sales from one date to another.

Mexico City stays at UTC-6 all year: Mexico's Time Zones Law, published in October 2022, ended daylight saving time everywhere except along the northern border. That makes it the same time as Chicago in winter and one hour behind it while the US is on daylight saving time. In UTC, the day starts at 6 p.m. in Mexico City, so every order placed between 6:00 and 11:59 p.m. gets the next day's date:

• Distorted daily sales. Afternoon and evening orders land on the wrong date.
• Month-end closes that don't match. An order placed at 8 p.m. on October 31 falls in November in UTC and no longer matches the ERP's October close.
• Mis-measured one-day campaigns. A sale that ends at midnight splits its results across two dates.

It isn't a Mexico-only problem: for a store in Toronto or New York, the UTC day starts at 7 p.m. in winter and 8 p.m. in summer.

The fix belongs in the model, not in each dashboard: convert to the America/Mexico_City zone, or your store's own, before grouping. Use the zone name, not a fixed offset, and make sure servers and tools have an up-to-date time zone database (tzdata): the end of daylight saving time in Mexico arrived in release 2022f, and with an older one, systems would keep shifting an hour every summer. Commerce Intelligence handles it in its settings: it asks for the database time zone (UTC) and the time zone you want to see the data in.

Common reporting mistakes in online stores

1. Calling the order total a sale, tax and shipping included.
2. Counting canceled orders or orders pending payment.
3. Grouping by day in UTC and finding out at month-end that the numbers don't match.
4. Not subtracting returns, or subtracting them on the wrong date.
5. Expecting analytics and the database to show the same revenue.
6. Calculating margin with the store's Cost field instead of the ERP cost.
7. Pointing dashboards straight at the production database, with heavy queries during peak sales.

How we do it at WolfSellers

We start with a diagnostic: which numbers each team uses, where they come from and where they stop matching. With finance and operations we define the metrics and choose: Admin reports and Advanced Reporting for the basics, Commerce Intelligence if your store runs on PaaS and you want BI without your own infrastructure, or a data warehouse if you need to join several sources. We don't sell Adobe licenses: Commerce Intelligence is contracted with Adobe, and in the diagnostic we estimate the total cost of each path.

Then we build the extraction from Adobe Commerce and the ERP, the net sales and margin model, and the dashboards. We cover it in our Business Intelligence, Data Engineering, ERP integration, Adobe Analytics and consulting services. As an Adobe partner in Mexico, we also help you choose between PaaS and SaaS Adobe Commerce with your reporting in mind. If you want to find out why your numbers don't match, you can contact us.

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Frequently asked questions about Adobe Commerce Intelligence and BI

What is Adobe Commerce Intelligence?

It's Adobe's cloud analytics platform for Adobe Commerce stores. It replicates data from the store and other sources into a data warehouse managed by Adobe, with visual or SQL reports, cohorts and shared dashboards. It's contracted with Adobe, and its documentation marks it for PaaS projects.

Is Magento Business Intelligence the same as Adobe Commerce Intelligence?

Yes. Magento Business Intelligence (MBI) is the former name of Adobe Commerce Intelligence. The Essentials edition is no longer offered; the current account includes the Data Warehouse Manager, third-party integrations and full API access.

Is Commerce Intelligence included with Adobe Commerce? How much does it cost?

It isn't part of the base package: per Adobe's product description, it's added as an upgrade or comes in a bundle that includes it. Adobe quotes the price. At WolfSellers we don't sell licenses; we estimate the total cost —license, implementation and operation— in a diagnostic.

Is Advanced Reporting free?

Yes. Adobe includes it at no extra cost in Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source, on PaaS projects. It shows orders, customers and products with data refreshed once a day, and it requires a single base currency since installation.

Can you connect Adobe Commerce to Looker Studio or Power BI?

Yes, though not directly: Adobe's documentation doesn't include an official connector. The usual approach is to move the data with the API, events or a replica into a data warehouse and connect the tool there; both tools have connectors for BigQuery, MySQL and PostgreSQL. Third-party connectors also exist.

How is Commerce Intelligence different from Adobe Analytics?

Adobe Analytics measures behavior —visits, funnels, attribution— from site tagging. Commerce Intelligence analyzes commercial records —orders, returns, customers— from the database. Their revenue numbers don't match, and they're used together: one for conversion, the other for sales and margin.

Why don't my BI's daily sales match the Admin?

It's almost always the time zone. Adobe Commerce stores dates in UTC and the Admin shows them in the configured zone. Mexico City is at UTC-6 all year, so an order placed after 6 p.m. falls on the next day in UTC. Convert to America/Mexico_City, or your store's zone, before grouping.

Does Commerce Intelligence work with Adobe Commerce as a Cloud Service?

Adobe's Admin documentation marks Commerce Intelligence and Advanced Reporting as PaaS-only. On the SaaS version, the path is to move the data with the REST API and events into a data warehouse and build BI there.

Related services

If this topic is relevant to your business, these services from WolfSellers can help you implement it:

• Business Intelligence
• Data Engineering & Integrations
• Adobe Commerce