Where a cockpit belongs to a module, a dashboard belongs to a purpose: a morning view for the owner, a sales board for the weekly meeting, a stock watch for the warehouse. Dashboards live under Business Intelligence → Dashboards, a company can have as many as it needs, and one of them is the default you land on.
The builder composes a dashboard from the widget gallery (2.5): pick a widget, choose its measure and how it should be sliced, place it. Widgets sit in a grid and can span one to three columns, so a headline KPI takes a narrow cell and a trend chart takes the wide one. Order and width are yours to arrange; the numbers are not — every widget reads a governed measure exactly as the cockpits do. The gallery also holds the views you saved yourself from Explore (2.15) — they place exactly like the shipped widgets, because that is what they are.
Three behaviours tie a dashboard together:
- Global filters. A date range — and, where your company tracks them, a branch or department — set once at the top applies to every widget on the dashboard at once. The whole page answers the same question.
- Drill-down. A KPI widget can be clicked through to the list of documents behind it, in the same spirit as the cockpit grid (2.3).
- Briefings by email. A dashboard can be sent as a PDF briefing to named recipients on a schedule — the same governed numbers, delivered to the inbox of someone who never opens the application. A briefing is a snapshot of the dashboard at sending time.
Retiring a dashboard. When a dashboard has served its purpose — a test board, last season's campaign view — Archive it, from the Dashboards list or at the top of its View and Edit pages. An archived dashboard leaves the everyday list, is never the dashboard you land on, and stops sending briefings — but nothing is deleted: its widgets stay exactly as arranged, and Unarchive brings it back untouched whenever you need it again. The list's Archived filter finds them: No shows your working dashboards, Yes shows the archive. Archiving rides the ordinary edit permission, so whoever looks after the dashboards can keep the list tidy; permanently deleting a dashboard stays an administrator-level act.
Your company did not start from a blank page here: the business profile chosen at setup (0.3) provisioned a starting dashboard fitted to your kind of business — trading companies start with sales and inventory, charities with donations — and new companies also receive the Executive composition (2.4). What you build on top of that starting point is yours; who may see or edit a dashboard rides the same permissions as everything else, hidden where not permitted.
Figure 2.3 — The dashboard builder. Drawing to be produced after the UI/UX pass: the builder with the widget gallery open, a widget being placed on the grid, and the global filters at the top.