Saving reports and managing dashboards
Save a report so you don't rebuild it, pin reports to a dashboard, set a default dashboard, and clone or restore a layout you changed.
A report answers a question once. A dashboard answers it every morning. This article covers keeping a report, putting it on a dashboard, and managing the dashboards your team lands on.
Save a report
When a report reads the way you want it, save it. A saved report keeps its object, measure, groupings and filters, so reopening it gives the same answer against current data instead of starting from an empty designer.
Saved reports are paginated. A report that returns hundreds of rows pages through them rather than rendering one endless table, which keeps a large report usable on a normal screen.
Pin a report to a dashboard
Pinning puts a saved report on a dashboard as a tile. The dashboard then shows the report's current result whenever it loads — you don't re-run anything by hand, and a reader doesn't need to know which report the tile came from.
Pin the reports a team checks daily and leave the one-off analyses unpinned. A dashboard with five tiles gets read; a dashboard with thirty gets scrolled past.
Dashboards
A dashboard is a layout of tiles. Everything on it comes from somewhere else — a saved report, a standard metric, an activity tile — so keeping the underlying reports current keeps the dashboard current.
- Switchers — move between dashboards and reports without going back to the navigation; the switcher keeps your place as you compare a tile to the report behind it.
- Default dashboard — set which dashboard opens first, so the team lands on the numbers that matter by default rather than on whichever one was created last.
- Clone a layout — copy a dashboard to use as the starting point for a variant, such as a per-team view of the same tiles.
- Restore a layout — go back to a previous arrangement after experimenting with tile positions, so rearranging is reversible.
Activity tiles
Activity tiles summarize the work happening on deals and companies over a period. Calendar events and meetings are counted alongside the other activity types, so a week full of meetings doesn't read as a week with no activity.
Who can use it
Dashboards and saved reports are part of base bont's reporting and follow the same permissions as the Report Designer. A user who can build a report can save it; a user who can only view a report can still read a dashboard it's pinned to.
In an organization that also runs pure bont, pure bont's own reporting tabs sit alongside these. See New-business reporting and Building a custom report for the report side.