This feature allows you to create and manage dashboards as well as to create new reports on these dashboards. Although Salesflare already comes with the reports most companies need built in, you can now build your very own ✨.

The custom reporting functionality is only available on the Pro Plan. To access this feature, upgrade to Pro by heading to Settings > Billing & Usage > Overview > Update plan.

We focused on making this as easy to use as possible, so you can easily extract all the insights you need. Regardless, this article can teach you all the little details.

Learn better with video? Watch here.

So what exactly are dashboards and reports?

In Salesflare, a report is a specific visual representation of a part of your data that provides you with concrete insights. It can be a chart, a table, or a scorecard.

A dashboard is the page where your related reports are grouped and displayed.

How can you work with them?

Here's a few things you can do to get started:

Edit a dashboard: To edit a dashboard, just click on the three-dot menu button at the top right, and then select "Edit dashboard".
Reorder reports: You can then reorder the reports on your dashboard simply by dragging and dropping. Scorecards are always grouped at the top. Other types of reports are placed below that.

Name the dashboard: You can change the name of each dashboard at the top left.

Create a dashboard: Click on the dashboard selector at the top left, and then select "Create dashboard" to create a new one. Give it a name and press "Save".

Now you’ve got your first custom dashboard, so it’s time to fill it in.

Creating a report

To fill your dashboard, you’ll need to create some reports. You’ll need to decide what title to give to the report, give it a description, decide which entity to report on, select a time filter, and then preview the data.

Create a report: To create the first report on your new dashboard, click the "add report" button at the top right. Next, you can begin to configure it.

Title it: You should give your report a title that explains what it's all about.
Give it a description: If you need more words to describe the report, then you can write up a description that explains it even better to yourself and your team members. It will appear when anyone hovers on the little info icon on the report.

Select the entity to report on: You can currently report on accounts, contacts, opportunities, and tasks. In our example here, we'll report on newly created opportunities, so we'll select "Opportunities" as the entity.

Select time filter: When filtering by time in the dashboard, you must decide what you want to apply this to. For example, you can report on the opportunities that are closed or are expected to be closed in the selected period or by those created in that period. This choice will depend on what your report is trying to display.
Preview the report: The next part of the report builder allows you to preview your report using the filters that you'll later have at the top right of your dashboard. That way you can have an idea of how your report will look in different periods, for different people, and for different pipelines. FYI - It’s not a setting that is fixed when you save the report, it only offers a way to preview your report.

Building the report

Now you’re ready to actually build the report. You’ll need to select your chart type, select how to view/measure/segment the chart, and play around with some other advanced options to get the designated outcome.

Chart type: To visualize your result in a different way, you can switch the chart types at the top left. Some chart types will be a better fit than others for what you’re trying to visualize. You can select from the following chart types:

Column chart
Bar chart
Line chart
Scorecard
Pie chart
Pivot table

View by, measure by, segment by: After selecting your chart type, you can define what you want to measure by, what you want to view this by, and optionally how you want the data to be segmented.

In our example, we want to see who created which total opportunity value in the selected period and pipeline, and segment this total value by the different stages they're in.

In this screenshot, we selected the following:

View by "Opportunity created by" to see who created the opportunities
Measure by "Opportunity value" and take the "sum" of those values to see the total value of those opportunities
Segment by "Opportunity stage" to see the total value in each of the different stages they’re in.

Ordering

A quick note: data is always ordered in the same way.

Time is always chronological
Stages are always in their set order
And other things are ordered from largest to smallest result

Advanced options

The first two advanced options allow you to also include the data points for which the "view by" or "segment by" isn't specified. If, for example, you segment by account country, you can use this to include the opportunities for which the account country isn't specified.

If you want to build a report that is independent of the dashboard's time filters, you can select "Don't apply the dashboard time filter". This is, for instance, handy if you want to count the all-time number of opportunities your team created.

If you want to see the bars representing the segments next to each other instead of stacked, simply unselect "Stack segments" in the "Advanced" options.

Limits

Note that, in some cases, segmenting by certain data points will display only the top X number while the rest are grouped in the ‘Other’ section. For example, when segmenting by countries. This protects your report from becoming more detailed and difficult to visualize than necessary.

A similar protection on the amount of data points is used when reporting by time. The maximum you can visualize is 366 data points, aka the maximum number of days in a year.

Filter your data set

Last but not least, if you want to report on a subset of your data only, you can do this with the filters at the right. These filters work the exact same way as everywhere else in Salesflare; for example, when filtering different lists, or selecting an audience for a workflow.

For example, you can filter opportunities to find those that are linked to the accounts with which you were in contact in the past month - aka "Last interaction date is less than 30 days ago".

Create the report

When you're happy with the report, you can click "create".

And there you go! Your “Sales Performance dashboard” now contains its first report. Add some more reports to fill your dashboard.

Duplicating, moving/reordering, and deleting

Here are a few final things you can do to get your dashboards looking the way you want.

Reorder dashboards: To reorder the dashboards, open the menu at the top right again. Click 'Reorder dashboards' and drag them around. Save when you're ready.
Delete/edit dashboard: To delete a dashboard - or edit it again, that's also in the same menu as reordering.

Duplicate reports: If you want to duplicate a report, click on the menu button at the top right of each report and select "Duplicate".
Delete reports: If there's any report you don't want, just delete it. Note that the built-in reports are not deletable, as they are natively built and can't easily be recreated with the custom reporting functionality. In case you really don't want to see a built-in report anymore, it's best to move it to another dashboard.
Move reports: You can move a report to a different dashboard by clicking "Move" and then selecting the preferred dashboard.