A data import brings a copy of data into the BI tool rather than reading the source each time. The copy might come from a spreadsheet, an exported file, a business app such as Salesforce or Shopify, or a database table you want to keep separate. Imports run on a schedule you choose — hourly, nightly, weekly — or whenever someone presses refresh, and the charts run against the copy.
Imports are the practical answer for data that has no live door. A marketing team pulls campaign spend from its advertising platforms; an accountant uploads the month’s trial balance from a spreadsheet; a school imports enrolment from a system that only exports CSV. Imports also suit very large history tables where you want speed and do not need this minute’s figures: a distributor’s five years of invoices, refreshed each night, will chart faster from a copy.
The trade-off is freshness: an import is only as current as its last run. Rule of thumb — live for today’s operational numbers, import for apps, files and history. Also check what happens when the source changes shape: a new column in the spreadsheet should not silently break the dashboard, and the import should tell you when a run fails rather than showing stale figures as if they were new.
In Klayara, imports from files, spreadsheets and business apps are set up in a few steps, refresh on a schedule you set, and can be joined to live tables on the same dashboard. See the connector catalogue and the spreadsheet-to-dashboard guide.