Automate Klips: from repetitive tasks to managing reporting at scale

The Klipfolio API gives you programmatic control over Klips, dashboards, data sources, and client accounts — so you can automate the work, manage your reporting environment, and scale deployments without scaling manual effort.

There's a point in almost every Klips implementation where the question changes.

At first, you're asking:

How do I build this dashboard?

Then, after you've built it a few times:

How do I stop doing this manually?

Maybe you're refreshing data sources for a client. Provisioning dashboards for a new business unit. Checking hundreds of client accounts for unused assets. Updating a data source without rebuilding the Klips that depend on it.

Or perhaps you're a partner managing reporting for dozens or hundreds of clients, and you need a way to deploy and maintain a consistent reporting experience across all of them.

That's where the Klipfolio API comes in.

The API provides programmatic access to the core assets you manage in Klips, including clients, dashboards, Klips, and data sources. It follows a REST architecture, uses HTTPS, and returns JSON responses. The things you can manage through the Klips interface can also become part of an automated process.

Explore the Klipfolio API documentation

The important idea isn't simply that Klips has an API.

It's that you can start treating your reporting environment as something you can automate, manage, and scale.

Three ways to think about the API

There are three increasingly powerful ways to use the Klips API.

1. Automate

Start with the repetitive work.

If someone on your team does the same thing over and over in Klips, there's a good chance you can turn that task into an automated workflow.

For example:

• Refresh data sources on a schedule or on demand
• Create or update Klips without opening the interface
• Create dashboards as part of a broader process
• Add users during onboarding
• Manage published links for clients or campaigns
• Retrieve account information for auditing or reporting
• Clean up old assets that are no longer needed

Instead of:

Open Klips → find something → make a change → repeat

you can have a script or application do it for you.

The API supports the standard REST operations you'd expect: GET to retrieve resources, POST to create them, PUT to update them, and DELETE to remove them.

Eliminating a five-minute task that happens 100 times a month isn't a small thing. It's a workflow.

2. Manage

The API becomes even more useful when you stop thinking about individual actions and start thinking about the state of your Klips environment.

For example:

• How many Klips do we have?
• Which dashboards are using them?
• Which data sources are connected?
• When did those data sources last refresh?
• Are there Klips that aren't being used?
• What's happening across our client accounts?

These are management questions, not just automation tasks.

The API lets you retrieve lists and details for assets such as Klips and data sources, including information that helps you understand their relationships and state. You can retrieve Klips associated with a particular data source, retrieve the detailed information for a Klip, and retrieve Klip instances across client accounts.

View the Klips API reference

Data sources expose information such as their connector, refresh interval, and last refresh time, which is useful for building your own monitoring or auditing workflows.

View the Data Sources API reference

Your Klips environment can become something you inspect, audit, and manage programmatically.

3. Scale

This is where the API becomes particularly powerful for larger organizations and Klipfolio partners.

Imagine you're an agency managing reporting for 100 clients. You've developed a solid reporting framework: an executive dashboard, a marketing dashboard, a sales dashboard, performance reporting, and client-specific data sources. The basic structure is similar for every client.

Manually deploying and maintaining that environment 100 times creates a lot of work and a lot of opportunity for inconsistency.

With the API, you can start treating your reporting experience more like a product.

A new client comes on board. Your systems can:

1. Create or configure the client account
2. Create the required dashboards
3. Create the required Klips
4. Configure the client's data sources
5. Apply client-specific settings
6. Complete the deployment

The Klips API supports creating, updating, and deleting Klips, including creating or updating Klips for a specific client account. The same applies to data sources, which can also be created for client accounts.

Instead of building every deployment manually, you've created a repeatable deployment process. When you have 100 clients, that's a very different proposition.

Small automation can lead to big changes

You don't have to be managing hundreds of clients to benefit from the API. Some of the most useful automations are small.

Refresh your data

Maybe your team needs to trigger a refresh before a report is reviewed. Instead of someone logging into Klips and doing it manually, your process can trigger the refresh programmatically.

Manage users

When someone joins or leaves a team, your internal process can manage their Klips access as part of a broader onboarding or offboarding workflow.

Manage published dashboards

If you're creating published links for clients or campaigns, those can become part of an automated process rather than a manual checklist.

Keep things tidy

If your organization creates temporary dashboards or Klips, you can build processes to identify and clean up assets that are no longer needed.

None of these is particularly complicated. But they all share the same benefit:

The computer does the repetitive work so your people don't have to.

Build your own Klips health check

Once you can retrieve information from your Klips environment, you can start building tools that answer questions the standard interface may not answer in exactly the way you need.

Imagine an internal "Klipfolio Health Check" that runs every night. It could look for:

• Klips that aren't associated with a dashboard
• Data sources that haven't refreshed recently
• Unexpected changes to reporting assets
• Clients with unusual resource usage
• Users who haven't logged in recently
• Dashboards that are no longer being used

The API doesn't have to be the end product. It can be the data layer behind your own operational tools. You might surface the results in a spreadsheet, an internal dashboard, a Slack notification, an admin portal, or an automated email.

The possibilities come from combining Klips with the systems you already use.

Make changes without rebuilding everything

One of the most valuable use cases for an API is managing change.

Consider a customer who needs to migrate their reporting infrastructure. They have dozens of data sources and hundreds of Klips built on top of them. A manual migration could mean opening each data source, finding the associated Klips, and rebuilding or relinking things one by one.

That's exactly the kind of situation where programmatic access helps.

You can retrieve data-source configuration, identify the assets associated with it, make the required changes, and preserve the rest of the reporting environment.

The result isn't just faster. It's safer and more repeatable. Instead of relying on someone to remember every step, you can encode the process. That becomes particularly valuable when the same migration needs to happen across multiple clients.

Treat client reporting like a fleet

This is particularly relevant for Klipfolio partners.

If you manage reporting for one client, you have a reporting environment. If you manage reporting for 100 clients, you have something closer to a fleet of reporting environments. Fleets need different tools.

You want to know:

• Which clients are using which assets?
• Which deployments are up to date?
• Which clients have unused resources?
• Where is a particular Klip deployed?
• Which data sources need attention?
• How consistent are our deployments?
• How quickly can we roll out a new reporting experience?

The API gives partners a way to build those capabilities into their own systems. For example, the API can retrieve the client instances associated with a particular Klip, making it possible to understand where a reporting asset has been deployed.

That means you can move from managing clients one at a time to managing your entire client base as a system.

Build once. Deploy many.

There's another powerful pattern here: standardization.

Imagine you've built the ideal reporting experience for a particular type of customer. Rather than treating that experience as a collection of dashboards that someone has to recreate for every new customer, you can turn it into a repeatable deployment process.

Your reporting package might include:

Executive overview

• Revenue
• Leads
• Customers
• Pipeline

Marketing

• Traffic
• Campaign performance
• Cost per lead

Sales

• Pipeline
• Win rate
• Average deal size

The structure stays consistent. The data changes. The customer-specific configuration changes. Your deployment process handles the difference.

That lets you build a reporting experience once and deploy it repeatedly. When the standard changes, you have a mechanism for rolling that change out rather than rebuilding everything from scratch.

The API connects Klips to the rest of your business

The API becomes even more powerful when it's part of a larger workflow.

For example:

CRM
  ?
New customer
  ?
Automation
  ?
Klipfolio API
  ?
Client + dashboards + Klips + data sources
  ?
Reporting environment ready

Or:

Internal system
  ?
"Client has upgraded"
  ?
Klipfolio API
  ?
Add dashboards + reporting assets

Or:

Scheduled process
  ?
Check all client accounts
  ?
Klipfolio API
  ?
Identify issues
  ?
Alert the team

The API becomes the bridge between Klips and the systems you already depend on.

Designed for programmatic use

The API is built around familiar web technologies, so you don't need a proprietary development environment to get started.

It's a REST API accessed over HTTPS, with JSON responses. Authentication supports both Basic Authentication and API keys. API permissions map to the permissions available in the Klipfolio dashboard interface.

The API also supports pagination for larger collections, with up to 100 results per request, and currently supports up to five requests per second, with daily request limits based on your plan.

For developers building larger automations, those details matter. But you don't need to understand all of them before finding your first useful automation.

Start with the task. Then work backwards to the API.

Where should you start?

Look at the work your team does repeatedly in Klips.

What do we do every day?

Could it be automated?

What do we do every time we onboard a client?

Could it become a repeatable deployment?

What do we periodically check?

Could we build an automated audit?

What happens across dozens or hundreds of accounts?

Could we manage those accounts programmatically instead of individually?

What changes do we repeatedly make?

Could we turn the process into a deployment or migration script?

You don't need to automate everything. Find the one thing that shouldn't require a person. Automate that. Then find the next thing.

From automation to a platform

The most interesting thing about the Klips API isn't any individual endpoint. It's what happens when you start combining them.

A simple automation might refresh a data source. A more sophisticated one might audit an entire account. A partner might use the API to provision and maintain hundreds of client deployments. A software company might build Klips directly into its own product or service.

At each step, the underlying idea is the same:

Your reporting environment doesn't have to be something you only operate through a browser. It can be part of your systems, your workflows, and your products.

That's the real value of the Klipfolio API.

Automate the repetitive. Manage the complex. Scale what works.

And, increasingly, use software — and AI — to do more of the work for you.

Get started with the Klipfolio API