Building a Dashboard
A dashboard collects saved queries into one screen.
Where to find it
Architect Panel → Dashboards:
- BI Dashboards — create and edit dashboards
- Custom Dashboard Blocks — blocks beyond the standard chart types
- Dashboard Styles — how they look
- Shared Dashboard Layout — a layout used across a team
Decide what it is for
The best dashboards answer one question: is anything wrong today. Overdue obligations, unallocated cases, stock below minimum, an unprocessed feed inbox, maintenance due, aged debt.
Analysis is a different job and belongs in a report somebody opens deliberately. Mixing the two produces a screen that is neither — too detailed to scan and too shallow to investigate with.
Keep it short
A dashboard of twenty charts is one nobody reads. Its real cost is not the wasted effort; it is that the two figures that genuinely mattered were on it and got ignored among the other eighteen.
Six to eight blocks is usually the practical limit for something scanned daily.
Choose the right block
- Trends over time — a line, with gap fill on.
- Comparisons between categories — a bar, sorted, top-N.
- A single important number — a figure, not a chart of one thing.
- Things to act on — a listing in list mode.
A pie chart with eleven segments communicates less than the list it was made from.
Shared layouts
Where a team should all see the same thing, use a Shared Dashboard Layout rather than each person building their own. One change updates everyone, and it prevents the situation where two people in a meeting are looking at differently-configured versions of the same dashboard and disagreeing about reality.
Styles
Dashboard Styles keeps presentation consistent. Use colour to mean something — red for breach, amber for approaching — and use it sparingly. A dashboard where everything is coloured conveys nothing.
Worked example
A casework team's dashboard has six blocks: cases opened this week (figure), open by stage (bar), obligations due in seven days (figure), breached this month (figure, red when above zero), unallocated (listing), and oldest ten open cases (listing). It is scanned every morning in five minutes, and every block has a next action attached to it.
Review what is actually used
Dashboards accumulate. Once or twice a year, find out which are still opened and retire the rest. A stale dashboard showing a metric nobody tracks any more is worse than none, because somebody will eventually believe it.
Recommendations
- One question per dashboard.
- Every block should imply an action. If it does not, it belongs in a report.
- Use shared layouts for teams.
- Retire dashboards nobody opens.