Parallax APIs & Webhook options
Parallax has added on to or built out new ways for our customers to write, call, update and delete data in Parallax. Some of the ways to perform these actions simply require an API key that our team can generate for you and others require checking your license and even some technical mapping and consulting.
Read-only, Reporting API:
Cost: Free
How to request access: Contact your CSM and an API key will be generated for you
Documentation: An API document with specifications and existing data endpoint availability will be provided along with your API key
Limits:
- Max of 10 requests per minute
- Max of 90 days of data per request
Description:
- Five main categories of endpoints for ONLY calling Parallax data from Parallax and into another system or database
- People Utilization
- People Financials
- Project Listing
- Project Financials by Period by Offering
- Project Financials by Period by Project Role
Common Use Cases:
- Snapshotting Parallax data to use a tool like Power BI or Tableau to analyze the data that Insights reporting doesn’t natively support
- Pulling in Parallax data into a data lake or database to integrate the data into other critical financial or operational data from other tools or systems
Real world examples:
- One customer who has a partnership with other agencies but that resource separately, pulls each instance of Parallax data to aggregate and build an aggregate view of the full portfolio of agencies.
- Another customer pulls data every hour to feed a data lake where they aggregate financial analysis along with other delivery metrics from other SaaS tools to build a BI tool that is used to report to the Leadership team on a monthly basis.
Public (ie Write, Read & Delete) API
Cost: $$ Depends on License tier
How to request access: Contact your CSM to determine access or upgrade to license
Documentation: https://developer.getparallax.com/api-documentation/swagger
Limits:
- https://developer.getparallax.com/api-documentation/swagger/using-endpoints
- Rate Limit set to 100 requests within a 60 second window
Description:
- Built to modern industry standards, these endpoints allow customers to not only read specific data endpoints from Parallax, but also update them from other systems or even build out their own integrations
- See the link above for the specific list of endpoints
- There is a search tool in the upper right corner to quickly validate if the endpoint exists
- Not all endpoints have the same functions, so validate your action (Get, Post, Patch, etc) when determining your use case
Common Use Cases:
- Plans or actuals are tracked and made in systems without native integrations, and rather than upload or make the updates manually, the process is automated using a script that calls the API
- A system is updating data on a regular basis that has impacts to Parallax, so a script is used to gather the updates and push them to Parallax or vice versa
Real world examples:
- One customer built out a CRM integration to Parallax to manage the deals in a single CRM that is shared by multiple agencies, but that have separate Parallax instances.
- A customer manages all their tasks and deliverables in a homegrown delivery system. It contains all the actuals related to their team, and they use their hierarchy of project system to build Projects and offerings to aggregate all their delivery efforts under clients for utilization tracking.
- Another customer using their robust CRM for all their CFO’s financial forecasting. They map all their retainer and recurring revenue, in which the CRM is the source of truth, to Parallax’s revenue events on a per offering basis so that both systems are in alignment.
Webhooks, part of Public API
Cost: Depends on License tier
How to request access: Contact your CSM to determine access or upgrade to license
Documentation: https://developer.getparallax.com/api-documentation/swagger/webhooks
Description:
- Parallax’s newest addition and still in Beta
- Meant to support integrations using Zapier, N8N, etc using the same calling structure of the Public APIs
- Limited use cases given it’s recent release, so feedback and use cases are welcome!