Pro Tips: Dashboards

Dashboards and the reports on them can provide you with extensive valuable information, automate monthly and quarterly reporting, process calculations, produce digestible visualizations, and much, much more. Since the data is vast and the possibilities endless, we want to share the tips and best practices we've discovered over our own dashboard journey so you can gain all the success the experience has to offer.

Tag with purpose.

Rather than having a single dashboard under each dashboard tag, make sure your dashboard tags are broad but specific enough to have multiple dashboards under each. It gets a bit unruly to have each dashboard with its own tag. Bonus tip: Make a tag for each use case or persona you're categorizing your dashboards for!

Let rows tell your story.

Make sure each row of reports in a dashboard represents data for similar use cases so you can create a row description that makes it easy for the user to follow the flow of the dashboard. For example, adding a row title with the question "How are we tracking towards our overall KPIs?" identifies exactly what the reports in that row should be clarifying; New Business Bookings Goal this Quarter, New Business QTD Gap to Goal, New Business Closing this Quarter, and New Business Commit this Quarter. Letting the row tell your story makes it obvious what the data is telling you.

Interactive Cards

Interactive Cards are adjustable versions of base reports that live exclusively on a dashboard and allow you to make real-time changes without modifying the base report. Using interactive cards also gives you the option to either:

a) make interactive changes to view similar reports from different perspectives, allowing you to use one card for multiple inspections (available to anyone that can view the dashboard), or

b) copy a card, add the card to the dashboard, make slight adjustments, then save the dashboard, allowing you to see very similar reports next to each out without adding any new reports to your library (only dashboard editors can save changes to the dashboard)

Add columns for pivot fields.

If you’re pivoting on a specific field, make sure to include that field as a column (filter) to offer transparency on where those numbers come from. Let's say you’re looking at open pipeline by product, you’d want to be able to see ‘product’ as a column in your report. You can add a field as a filter without filtering anything out just so it can be visible on your report.