Build a dashboard
A dashboard is a screen of panels. Each panel is either a saved report or a pipeline panel showing funnel, velocity, or time in stage. Save the reports you check often, arrange them on one dashboard, and decide whether it is yours alone or shared with the team.
Requirements: a role that can create reports and dashboards, and at least one saved report worth showing.
Individual reports answer individual questions. A dashboard is for the questions you ask every time — how the month is going, what is in the pipeline, how busy next week looks — gathered onto one screen so checking them is a glance rather than a task.
Steps
- Save the reports first. A dashboard shows saved reports, so build and save each one before assembling — see build a report.
- Create the dashboard and name it for the audience or the moment: "Monday morning", "Sales overview", "Front desk".
- Add report panels. Each saved report becomes a panel, keeping the chart type you chose for it.
- Add pipeline panels if useful. Beyond ordinary reports, a dashboard can show a pipeline's own analytics — the funnel through its stages, how quickly work moves, and how long entries sit in each stage. These come from the pipeline itself rather than from a report you build.
- Arrange the panels so the thing you look at first is at the top. A dashboard read top-left first is a dashboard people actually use.
- Choose shared or personal. Shared puts the team on the same numbers; personal keeps a working view to yourself.
What makes a dashboard worth having
Two habits separate a dashboard people check from one they ignore.
Answer questions, not "show data". Every panel should correspond to something a person actually wonders. A panel nobody has a question for is noise, however impressive the chart.
Keep it short. Six panels someone reads beats twenty they scroll past. If a panel has not influenced a decision in a month, remove it — the dashboard is not an archive.
Everything stays live
Panels are not snapshots. Each one recalculates from current records whenever the dashboard is opened, so what you see is the state of the business now, not when it was assembled. Nothing needs refreshing or rebuilding on a schedule.
Notes and limitations
- Panels come from saved reports — save a report before adding it.
- Pipeline panels are a different kind of panel, drawn from a pipeline's own analytics rather than a report spec.
- Shared or personal is a property of the whole dashboard, not per panel.
- Everything is live — no stored copies, and history comes from period comparison inside a report.
- A panel is only as good as the collection under it — if grouping is missing, fix the model, not the dashboard.
Related
Building the panels themselves is in build a report; what reports are and how they differ from views is in how reports work. Pipeline panels depend on stages — see stages vs option field vs status.