About Dashboards

Dashboards help you monitor and access the most important aspects of your business. They provide at-a-glance insight into your company, customized for the needs of specific roles. This makes it easy for users to see the information that's relevant to them.

Dashboards consist of components that show snapshots of different parts of your business, such as:

• Performance cards
• Reports
• Graphs
• Calendars
• Shortcut links
• Lists: customers, AR sales invoices, locations, and so on
• News feeds

Who uses dashboards?

Dashboards are highly configurable and contain different types of information. You can set up a dashboard for each role in your company.

Dashboards can be:

• Role-based: make it easy to give important information to people in similar roles within or outside finance. Examples of role-based dashboards include CFO, department manager, project manager, board member, and so on. You can even create dashboards for people outside the financial areas, for example, in leadership.
• User-based: customized to suit a specific user or group of users. For example, a set of external users like recruiters need highly specific statistical information to ensure that staffing is always sized right.
• Analysis-based: useful for leaders who are looking at the overall performance of the business. These types of dashboards are mostly performance cards or reports.
• Outcome-based: concentrate on key performance indicators (KPIs) and outcome metrics. These dashboards can marry financial impact with statistical data or industry-wide performance. For example, create a dashboard that looks at the bottom line and the statistical units, to look at the overall outcome metrics.
• Industry-based: for certain industries such as construction or projects, there are dashboards specially designed to include the information most often used by those industries.

The following setup for a CFO dashboard includes charts, graphs, performance cards, reports, and records relevant to what a CFO needs to know. Dashboard users can drill down into reports and records right from the dashboard, making it easy to learn more and act on the data.

The following is another example of how role-based dashboards can be tailored to specific roles. The dashboard is for department managers, who concentrate on expenses, revenue, and budgets, and links to internal guideline documents and approvals.

Key information can be captured in lists and reports, such as dimensions, amounts, journals, and so on. Drill down from reports to record details.

In companies with multiple entities, dashboards can be shared across entities or limited to a single entity.

To use a dashboard, you must have both permission to access the dashboard and the information displayed there. For example, to see a financial report, you need to have permissions for the report and for the underlying data.

Make the most of dashboards

Highly customizable dashboards in Intacct are the fastest way to deliver easily consumed information to users. Dashboards are available for all companies that were created with a QuickStart.

Some of the ways that Intacct dashboards are used is to give:

• Key metrics in one place for executives and others. For example, create performance cards to show things like administrative expenses, profit and loss, or how travel expenses compare to the previous period.
• A distribution method for financial and statistical information: add any viewable list to a dashboard.
• Organized information for review and analysis: for people looking at the overall performance of the company, analysis-based dashboards are useful.
• A hub for things that need attention so you can act immediately, directly from the dashboard.
• Collaboration with others: include a component for Collaborate. This lets you review and comment on items from directly inside the dashboard. Creating a collaboration group ensures that only the people for whom the dashboard is relevant participate in the collaboration.
• Groups of related dashboards: group related dashboards into a submenu for quick access.

Design your dashboard

Whether you're creating one dashboard, many dashboards, or changing dashboards installed from the QuickStart library, there are some things to consider.

• Consider who the dashboard is meant for. Are you creating the dashboard for specific roles within the company, external users, or individuals? Each has a different informational need, so decide ahead of time who each dashboard is for.
• Determine what content will give the right information. After you know who you're creating the dashboard for, decide what type of information the user will find most important. For example, will reports be best? Performance cards? Analysis? Collaboration? Then you can tailor the dashboard to the user.
• Make it collaborative. Take dashboard components from different areas to create a dashboard that multiple people can use to collaborate across teams. Then, include Collaborate to ensure that the entire team is looped into conversations, with the relevant information right there whenever they access the dashboard.
• Sketch out the way you want the dashboard to look and how you'll build it. You can move dashboard components around in the dashboard. However, starting with a good base plan will make creating the dashboard faster and easier.

Components are the building blocks of Intacct dashboards. Combine different components to create the best information type for your needs.

Be creative

Create shortcuts to your most often used applications, reports, and files.

Use Smart links in dashboards to link to anything with a URL (such as manuals, trade websites, and videos).

Use filtering to limit dashboard information to particular dimensions. You can filter financial reports, graphs, and performance cards directly on the dashboard.

Here are some ideas of how dashboards can be used. Each addresses the needs of a specific user or role.

• Share files with others: Using the Smart Links component, you can share files with others. For example, an Accounts Payable team can share resources seamlessly. In this case, the files are stored in a cloud application that provides a URL for each one.
• Show Key Performance Indicators: Graphs make great KPI components. Add a graph for each KPI useful to the dashboard users. For example, you can include a link to an industry website.
• Combine individual reports on the page to mimic a single report: Sometimes you have multiple reports that could be combined to create a single report, but the report areas are unrelated.
• Adjust your dashboard to mimic a report: Add several simpler reports side-by-side. For example, the reports for Revenue, Staffing, and Expense could be used to create a compliance scheduling profile.
• Create an end-of-month activity hub: Use the calendar and different reports to create an at-a-glance hub for end-of-month activities like trial balance, AR, AP, GL, and locations. In multi-entity companies, you can include entities.

Find more examples on the Sage Intacct community.

Restrict access

Security is a primary concern, and you do not want everyone to have access to certain company information. Several types of permissions apply to dashboards.

• General dashboard permissions

  You set these permissions in Company permissions.

  Users who only have permission to View dashboards can see the dashboard information, but can't change it in any way.

  Users who also have permission to Edit dashboards can change dashboard components.

• Permissions to view specific dashboards

  The dashboard owner or the administrator can use the dashboard Permissions tab to set access rights to the dashboard (though administrators can always view dashboards).

  Access rights are prioritized in the following ways:

  • User rights take priority over group rights.

    For example, if you allow access rights to a group, but deny access rights to a user within the group, the user does not have permission to access the dashboard.

  • For groups, Allow takes priority over Deny.

    For example, if you deny access to the group "Everyone" but allow access to the group "Department Managers", users in the group "Department Managers" can access the dashboard.

• Permissions to view and use dashboard components

  There are some components that everyone can view, such as shortcut links, calendars, and news feeds. Other components require specific permissions:

  • Records: If a component shows data from a type of record that requires permission, the user needs the relevant permission to view the component. Types of record that require permission include accounts, suppliers, AP supplier invoices, and AR sales invoices. Your administrator sets permissions to view different types of records.
  • Reports: To view a report component, a user needs permission to view the report. The owner of the report sets the permissions to view the report.

  If a user does not have permission to at least view a component, they'll see an error or a blank area where the component is.