DEEP Dive into Dashboards: Building Your Perfect Workspace

Hey R Mike here are you ready to unlock the command center of your business today we're diving deep into dashboards your personalized portal to productivity master of alliteration ever feel like your software dashboard is more like a disaster board I understand I've been there but today we're going to turn that chaos into Clarity I'm going to show you as the admin the incredible flexibility that you have we'll explore all the options the function ity and the sheer awesomeness of being able to design and assign specific dashboards to specific roles within your organization or even to specific people inside your organization and not only that but you can also do the

Same for your specific clients or types of clients based on your categorization think of it as building the ultimate Digital workspace for maximum efficiency and all of it designed by you okay you ready let's go okay let's started this dashboard which is kind of work in progress this is in our mock company accomplished CPA's account and I'm logged in as a super admin so typically the super admin would be the owner of the company and would have access to really everything and one of the things that might be typical for admins is that you would want to have this all tasks block on your dashboard this gives you a very nice insight into the tasks that are in the system regardless

Of if they're in a particular project if they're assigned to you as the admin or maybe they're assigned to clients you can Surface any task from this dashboard block so let's walk through it a little bit and you'll see how it works so here's one a task that is assigned to me as the admin and I see that I can complete that here or I can change anything about this task you'll see that the status shows as open and priority normal but what if I change it to Priority high I can see that it changes immediately in the dashboard priority normal Etc I can change the due date I can even change who it's assigned to so I can do that all within one click of the dashboard or I could

Upload task files easily I could drop them right here any files that were attached to the task would be visible and present here for me to download or preview and then I could always just mark this task as complete if I'm just trying to get to it quickly I could just mark it confirmed and now it's complete or I can just cancel as I'm doing here so this block is configured to only show five tasks as you see here but I could click here to view all tasks it would take me directly into the project management toolkit and to the all tasks menu same as if I was to click right here but what's really cool is this can Surface tasks that are not even showing now so I know that there's a task in the list of all task that has the word compile in

It so if I do an open search here and it just surfaces it now you see that if I go back and do open search I don't see compile here anywhere it's not in the first five tasks as they're currently sorted here but if I search for it I can bring it right up to the top so if I know what I'm looking for I can bring it quickly even if it's not in the task it doesn't matter if you have a million tasks a search will bring it right up and there's many ways to search so look you can search by due date and then you can select the range upcoming seven days past 7 Days some range or some custom range you can search by statuses any of your custom statuses would show up here you can customize and

Reorder them you can search by priority by client so this would be the client that the task is related to or you can search by aign let's go here and now I can search by say I know I have one to think sign to yes to this company which is a client but they have tasks Associated and assigned to them some of which are completed some of which are not completed as we see here or again I can go back to open search now once I have the tasks displayed I can sort them by any one of these options so a lot of powerful options here built into a nice clean dashboard block okay so now to hammer this home and help you truly understand

The functionality let's go to the content menu and to the list of dashboards I want to show you exactly how this dashboard is configured let's notice one thing before we do that is that this block the my invoices block doesn't quite line up and the spacing isn't quite what I want it to be I want it to be a little more so that it matches what is here just for visual consistency so here we go to dashboards I want to go to dashboards and then I want to choose a admin accomplished that's the one we're looking at and here we are in the configuration of the dashboard first let's look over here and see that it is assigned specifically to me as the super admin you'll have to understand this highest medium and lowest priority as

Far as which dashboards are assigned to which groups or people directly and in this case I've assigned it specifically only to one person and that's the highest priority so Matthew Bley will always get this dashboard now when I go to the all task block here and I edit I'm going to get the configuration screen here and you'll see that I have a lot of options I could actually rame it I could say company tasks let's just say make it different I can show five or I can show up to 20 all at one time so I could have a very large task dashboard with 20 tasks showing I can set the default sort and the default

Filter so if I wanted to always show say the highest priority or a specific priority I can just show urgent tasks or I can show all the priorities like this and then I can say show me Priority low to Urgent or urgent to low so in this case the most urgent priority would be at the top and then the lowest priority would be at the bottom and that's how it would come up every time it loaded it would be loaded specifically with this configuration if you remember I had some completed tasks that were sitting on my block there but if I have this checked then when I complete a task it will be automatically removed and replaced with the next appropriate task that is not completed

So you don't have completed tasks sitting there and then any of this information I can just choose to hide now why would I want to do that that's what's really powerful here and what I'm referring to is the ability to create dashboards that are perfectly configured for specific team members in your staff or clients right so let's start with team members let's just say you have like a college kid that just started and they're in your organization and you just want to show them specific things but not too much well what you can do is create a dashboard just like we showed here before you can assign it specifically to that person or maybe you put them in a team a specific team and they receive the

Dashboard because it's a low-level team that doesn't require a lot of access and then you can create a task block for them and you can just start to say well I want to let's not show them the name of the client how about that and that might be one that's appropriate for a freelancer saying or maybe you don't want them to see the task files or maybe don't want them to see the project name or whatever it is you don't want them to see and then maybe you only want them to see tasks with specific statuses however it is you are able to really customize and this configuration will only apply to this task block on this dashboard so in a very granular way you can customize this

Particular presentation of the tasks and allow it to show to this specific staff member and limit or Focus or narrow their Vision based on your use case and how you want them to use and see the underlying data so that's pretty powerful you can make specific dashboards for specific people and on those dashboards you can specifically refine and design the functionality and visibility of elements based on those specific people people's needs and you can do this with multiple dashboards you can create a thousand dashboards if that's what you need most businesses need five maybe 10 for specific purposes and

Understand that you can assign the dashboards based on their needs but not only that inside the dashboards you can control visibility of specific blocks specific roles specific columns based on the logged in user role or their association with a circle or with a team so you can customize these dashboards to work on many levels in a very granular way let's also understand that this task block for example you can show only to specific roles or you can hide for specific roles or you can show it only for specific users or hide for specific users and depending on the Block for which you are setting these options you may have more options like circles or teams or you may have fewer options and this is usually

Defined by the permissions of the resource that you're trying to assign let's move here and remember that that my invoice is blocked with a little bit of styling that we want to add to it so I'm going to go inside here and you'll see that my invoices has the same sort of let's set the uh defaults for this I'll just leave it alone for now but understand this here you can set currency defaults show the Avatar show the grand total this is one of those blocks you can show to clients no problem you can show it to your teammates no problem in here you may not want to show the invoice status or the payment type to your clients maybe you just want to show them very specific information you can adjust that on a granular level here and then here in

Style options let's move and add a few more pixels to this and then I want to remove some pixels from these outside areas of margin and I'm going to click save now it looks a little closer where we want to be let's go ahead and click save and then we'll move to okay we're back back I'm going to refresh here we're back at the dashboard and now look how our blocks are lined up nicely we have almost the exact same spacing here I might even take out a couple pixels here to make this look really really clean and so now I have an all task block I have a my invoices block which works in just the same way as we saw up here but with some very specific my invoicing nice to have

So we see that this invoice is open I can click here and see the entire invoice see all of the items I know everything about this invoice I can see attached files I can view the attached files if that's the case but what's nice is I can also record the payment here as an admin so let's just say I get a stack of checks in the mail I've used my bank app and deposited them all and now I need to satisfy them in my invoicing software so now I'm jumping into SuiteDash and right on my dashboard I just click record payment this can be my default let's just say check these are customizable you can put Bitcoin in here you can trade chickens you can do whatever you want to do that can be anything you

Need but check is pretty typical in this case I want to uncheck that because maybe I don't want to send an email and I'm going to record payment and it'll satisfy this invoice okay so my invoice is fully paid it was paid on this date this was the due date so everything is clear for me here's the client I know it's done and that's great so I can do that right from the dashboard without digging into the invoicing tool without getting all the way in here and then filtering for the client I can see everything here if I wanted to search for a specific client I could do that here and just go to say buzzz Cola let's see if they have any invoices open with me here it is now I can do all the things that I need to do with that okay back to open search and now

I have my whole block populated again everything is just as it should be all right so we're not going to look through every single block and every single option that's available in those blocks but yes so let's look at one more block before we move on and start investigating the reporting block and this is the CRM filter block so right now it's set up with the default settings and I see my clients here I can see what circles they are in this is important maybe to you there's a company circle and a bookkeeping and a tax prep Circle I can imperson this client from right here and go directly in and see exactly what they see I can message this client from right here or very nicely I can get right to their dashboard just click that in a

New tab suddenly on the dashboard and now I can really perform anything that is available to me in their CRM dashboard I can make any of these choices and that is very powerful I can create notes and set events and change their circles etc etc but one thing to understand about the CRM filter block is that you can have multiple CRM filter blocks on a single dashboard and the reason this is important is that if you go to back to the configuration side I can create a CRM filter block and I can limit the filter to circles say for example and I can go down and say okay here's tax prep so now this CRM filter block will only show me CRM targets who are included in the tax prep Circle or

I could use bookkeeping okay okay or if I'm using a strategy whereby I create and assign a specific Circle for each onboarding step that I'm taking them through and as I'm taking them through these steps I'm adding them and removing them to those specific circles to help control their experience and what they have visibility of during that onboarding process and this is very common and we'll probably do a video to show that at some point but if I did that and say I had six different steps what I could easily do then is create a dashboard with six of these CRM filter blocks and in the first block I would put the circle for that step one in the second block I

Might use the step two and step three and step four and step five step six and depending on the layout in the end what I would see is six different blocks each block would show me exactly which CRM Target is in that step so I would be able to see my entire onboarding funnel and I would be able to see which of my CRM targets was in each step and I could easily access them I know what step they're in I would be able to impersonate them or message them and so right from that single dashboard I could see my entire onboarding structure my funnel who was where get to them very easily message them helped them out make sure they were Problem free Etc and this is super powerful and see you would do that here and

Then in this one in this rename you would just call this step one or whatever you wanted to call it and then in the second block I would call it step two and so and so so on the dashboard it be really clear like which block represented which stage and it'll be very clear which targets were in which stage so that's a really powerful way to use the CRM filter block but there are lots of options so you can use it any any way that is shown here you can show Deal stages you can show show login status you can even use custom tags so you can use this to facilitate almost any kind of tracking SL reporting that you're trying to do to understand which one of your CRM targets are where or at what status or in what condition this is all very custom to your

Workflow you decide what you want all the tools are here to help you make it happen Okay let's keep moving and the last thing we'll do in this video is let's just add another block here let's fill in this little blank and let's do the reporting block let's start here okay so the reporting block gives you a series of options that will be expanded but in this case you'll have this area here and it will take up this column as we showed here where I'm moving my mouse so I only want to fit say two across here so let's start with um let's just go to Total clients and total prospects and I'm showing two tiles so that is exactly what I need to show and I'm going to click save

Okay and now I just want to add another reporting Block in this one I want to do I want to keep two and I want to do total revenue and let's say open estimates and I'll click save okay so now I have two more okay so now I have two more reporting blocks and let's just do two more reporting block here and for this one we'll do total number in circles and let me set the circle we're going to find the circle and it's going to be let's see total number in tax prep and then we'll do um total then we'll do total leads okay let's just see here okay so I have no leads and I have three people in tax prep there's lots of ways you can configure this but just

Know that you can do multiple reporting blocks and you can create any number configurations you want if I wanted to do a bunch of single reporting blocks that show total number of circles and do an entire column over here for example easy to make columns that were very skinny on this side like this one would be have a skinny column on the left or a skinny column on the right then I could just stack reporting blocks down one side of the other and then show how many are in each circle so I always have a count of Circle A has 10 Circle B has 40 Circle C has 13 and that might help me in the same way that we just described using the CRM filter block but instead of seeing the actual people in it I'm getting a count using

The reporting block so you just need to play around with this keep working keep building refining designing according to your needs and you'll find out what's the most helpful to you all of these dashboard elements are designed to help quickly and easily surface information and data that is deeper in the platform so that you can move quickly and efficiently throughout your day and not just you and not just your day but you can design dashboards that will help members of your staff over here do that members of your staff over there do that and even your clients to move quickly and efficiently through the workloads that you have for them and every little bit that we gain in efficiency is falling to your bottom line so this is important that's all profit

Okay so before we save this and leave let's make some nice stylistic choices again remember I wanted to take some spacing out from here let's go back down to 20 I think we went from 15 to 25 and then here I want to try to even this up so this top reporting block let's look I'm going to go with h 10 here I think that'll accomplish it Yep looks good and then it looks like we're needing some adjustments so really quickly what I'll do is go through and probably take out all of these margins on the outside yep and I'll do that for these other two reporting blocks really quickly okay so then save okay and here we are on the front let's refresh all right so now we have our

Task block we have our filter block which we didn't really make many changes to but we talked about how it can be used we have the my invoices block and here we have our clients prospects Revenue they have a nice little block here so the default color is here and the default icons are here but let's go just one level deeper here before I leave and understand that you can change the colors of these icons so if we go here I can change the color let's just change it to something a little more pastel I don't know like this there's a lot of things that can work but you may have something that works really well for you and you find that it's

A nice look for your dashboard so we'll start with this there we go that not that nice but this can turn out really nicely it takes a little bit of time to get it just right so I won't bore you with that on this video but here's another demo company that we have that has a decent dashboard that I want you to see and if you get the colors right everything seems to come together and looks really pretty nice now the reporting block remember that you can click here for total revenue click here you'll go to your unpaid invoices you can always click any of these graphs to get a bigger version and to really drill down or just dissect your day a little bit here you can take any one of these charts any ones that you like

It looks like what you really want to show or think about keeping you can print or save you can make this full screen so you can do that all from the reporting Block in every case that you see a little chartlet we would call this that chartlet can be expanded these are just progress meters based on the data that is being funneled through the reporting block here's a good example example of level two clients which would be a custom designation for me and this mock company and I can call this whatever I want and then I'm seeing clients that in my use case here need extra attention based on whatever parameters I use to draw them to the surface here so this is a nice setup all right and the last thing I want to discuss

In this video is let's look at this mock company again accomplish CPAs but I'm going to log in as a client now and this client has has their dashboard something configured like a tax Center where we can put their returns we can assign tasks they can pay their invoices Etc so this is just a very simple dashboard created for this purpose a little experimental working on some things here but what I want to show here is that this is a file download block or it's actually three file download blocks these blocks are a little bit different than the my tasks and my invoices block which are designed in sort of a hardcoded way to have this white background these rounded edges it's got a header a footer everything is built into

This it's really scripted the way it should be and it really can't be displayed in another way as opposed to the file download block which was made to fit into some design that maybe you already have it is capable of that but in this case it looks best if I were to show it using this background that looks like it it was built and designed the same exact way as the my tasks my invoices and I just want to show you how this can be achieved okay so here I am in the list of dashboards inside accomplished CPAs I'm now logged back in as the super admin I'm going to go to this tax prep dashboard and we to show you how this is built right so here it says your tax Center here it has the task

Block the invoice block that we saw before and here's the three download blocks so if you notice they're in a column and here in this column is where the magic sort of happens okay so see the Border radius is set for 10 pixels and the background color is set for white you can just choose this and go all the way to White and that's what makes the background appear as that card okay because if I were to Let's remove this and I'll just leave that there because it won't matter I'm going to click save and now I'm going to preview as Morgan yes this one okay so when I preview it there's that same my task block and my invoices block but now look how this

Shows up so these download blocks and some of the other blocks are designed to fit into let's say I have a just a white background and I just want to use the white background I can do that or if I have a background with some color that I want to make and then show the files against that that gives me some flexibility here or in the case that I want to use the whole column and set the background color as white here this is a style choice and something that gives you flexibility so now here I am again and I can go back to excuse me Morgan here now I can see that it looks very similar and you

May have noticed played with the spacing to get the gutters and the padding right so that everything looks really uniform and this doesn't take much work just a little playing around with the pixels and there you'll have it but now it looks a lot like what this looks like looks cohesive it's a nice design keep in mind that you can always go here to styling options and really change how things are laid out this is where I put the background image in I can also use custom CSS here I can use a background texture there's a lot of options here so these dashboards as well as portal pages and landing pages have lots of designs options that you can use to get your presentation just as you would like and these styling options that you can use to get exactly what you want facing

To your clients to your staff Etc so SuiteMates start shaping your spectacular spaces remember these Dynamic dashboards deliver data directly driving decisions and dramatically developing daily Direction now dive in design diligently and definitely drop your dashboard toies in the comments below I can't do it with a straight face like this video if you found it helpful and definitely follow for Fantastic Future features and fast fixes thanks everyone see you bye