How to Create Sales Tracking Dashboards in SmartSuite

Foreign or welcome back guys. We're going to be getting started on the hour and about a minute and a half while you are getting settled in, get your SmartSuite account open. You don't have one. You can fix that with the description and leave us a comment in the chat. Let me know if you can see and hear. Okay, well, I know you can't see much at this point, but we'll be starting shortly. While we're getting ready, go ahead and share this stream. Share it on your feed, share it on your LinkedIn, share it on your YouTube. Whatever you have, share with a friend who might be interested in sales reporting helps this stream, helps this channel and also just helps your friends or audience or peers or family. Learn a little bit more about using SmartSuite or getting some reporting that actually helps them with their work. Sharing is caring. Right? We'll start on the hour. All right. Wow, that went really fast, didn't it? Here we are, we are back for another live stream on the process chat driven YouTube channel today. As you might have seen on the screen over here, we are talking about sales reporting inside of SmartSuite and because this is kind of one of the first times we're talking about reporting in general in SmartSuite on the channel, we're also going to be combining this use case tutorial with a bit of an overview of how to report in SmartSuite altogether, this is a live event if you haven't gathered by my social awkwardness. And so if you are joining me live, please do let me know in the comments area. Let me know you can see and hear. Okay. Let me know where you're coming coming from. Let me know you're alive so that way I'm not just talking to myself. Camera in a quiet room and we're going to be getting started right away. So here is our lineup for today's presentation. We've got a few things we want to cover inside this live stream. First thing is welcome or welcome back. For folks who do not know, this is not our first live stream around that rodeo here. We actually have three others in this series that have happened the past three weeks. So if you haven't already seen them, you may want to check them out. You can find them on our YouTube channel and it'll help you build on the skills you learn here. Also, I want to give an obligatory reminder and a shout out and a thank you and all the words in between for SmartSuite who is sponsoring today's video and supporting this channel at the same time. If you'd like to help out Our channel support SmartSuite support the work we do here for free, please do try to use our affiliate link in the description area of this video or or just showing up on the screen here. And sign up for SmartSuite for yourself if you sign up for a paid plan and contact their support. SmartSuite has even gone above and beyond and provided a 10% discount just for viewers of this channel, which is just super generous. And they didn't have to do that, but they did because they're just really nice people. So thank you, SmartSuite for that and for anyone who hasn't already, hope you'll take advantage of that link that savings. Who doesn't like a little savings? But let's dive into the actual meat today, which is not about signing up for SmartSuite. We covered that a few weeks ago, but instead talking about reporting, to talk about reporting. I feel like we need to start in a more theoretical land because, you know, that's where I always start. Guys, if you've been joining a stream or so, you know where we're beginning inside of kind of the reporting puzzle, we have a workflow that we go through. I think it's really easy for folks to think about reporting and think, okay, I need to utilize a particular widget, I need to utilize a particular view, I need to see a particular kind of data, because I need to do that. But that's really not what reporting is all about. And when we're talking about a sales reporting dashboard, we're really trying to accomplish this flow, which is a little small. So let's zoom in. What we want to do is identify a question, something we are trying to solve, track the data that tells us is the tell, tips us off about the answer to that question, review what we find, and then ultimately answer the question. And so despite today's theme being about building a sales reporting dashboard and summarizing your sales, or in this case, donation, revenue generation, really what we're trying to do today is to create a way to answer questions. So when we have this kind of workflow, when it comes to reporting, we have multiple things that are involved. Not just the dashboard and chart views that we'll talk about today, but also good data setup. If we're not tracking data properly, we will not be able to report on it in a meaningful way. If we are tracking too much data, we might not be able to see what it is we need to report on. If we're not tracking enough data, well, all of a Sudden, we are unable to report because there's simply nothing to report on. When we are trying to build out a sales reporting dashboard, it all starts with the data. So if you are someone who is joining us today and you're excited to check this out, but you don't yet have some kind of sales system tracking system where you track the information you need, then just recognize that this will be a little bit more inspirational and you will want to go back to our last livestream and set up your own CRM as shown here before you move on to these later steps. What we're showing you is kind of a step two, not a step one. So quick check here in the chat. I'm just curious how many of you folks here have already set up a report dashboard or chart inside of SmartSuite. Let me know in the chat. Just gonna peek over here because it's not gonna show up for me, unfortunately. So we've got some hellos. Hellos. But has anyone, has anyone set one up before? No, there's a little bit of a delay. So let me know in the chat if you have set up a dashboard or report in SmartSuite that'll help me know just how beginner friendly versus advanced to make our talk through today. Now let's go into SmartSuite and let's talk about what these options are. So flipping back over, here we are. Let's go to our lovely friend SmartSuite, and let's go back to the CRM we built last week. If you guys didn't join us, then just take my word for it. This is a donor relationship management system, a CRM or a DRM where we're tracking sales through the lens of a nonprofit use case. If you're not a nonprofit, don't be deterred. It's the same kind of principles, just slightly different data, slightly different terms. But inside this CRM area, we are indeed checking those first few blocks boxes of our workflow and we are using fields like amount of the donation contact, meaning the person who gave the donation and other things to actually give us reportable fields. We could then summarize using SmartSuite's reporting. So given we have all this rich data, we're ready to move on to the later stages of this journey where we want to start reviewing it, which is exactly where dashboards and chart views come in. What the heck are these things? Layla, you're hyping them. What are they? Well, these are types of views in SmartSuite. Views are found inside your apps, which is this Kind of bar here. And if you go over to this left side and click on the little carrot, you, you'll see all of the views that are added into your relevant area. We can add new views using the plus icon here, and particularly today. What we're looking at are two types, Chart view and dashboard view. Before I show you the examples that we've built out today, let me just give you a general overview of each of these view types so you understand what the heck your options are. Because really, when it comes to customizable reporting inside a smartsuite, these are your two best friends. Okay, so let's meet our first best friend. Chart view. This is a chart view. When you have a new view name and we can choose our privacy settings, a chart view generates a chart. I know you guys are so shocked by what this means here, but this allows us to take the information that we have tracked in our app and report on it visually. The types of visual options we have available to us are kind of like what you might expect in a spreadsheet. We can add bar charts, stacked bar chart, bubble charts, scatter charts, heat map charts, area charts, and so much more. Any way you could expect to see information in a typical spreadsheet, Especially on the simpler side, you would expect to see inside of SmartSuite using, say, a donut chart. We could report on the information we have based on the values that we have tracked on the records. It's very important to know that when it comes to these charts, we are limited to fields that are broken out as fields and in smartsuite. So let me show you what I mean here we've got choices like amount, designation, donation id. All of these things are our fields. What the heck are fields? These are the things that we have viewed as columns in a grid view or show up as fields inside the record itself. So you need to have things broken out in order to report on them. That goes back to that good data to begin with. But back to our chart view. Assuming we have great values. That's a pun. Assuming we have good fields to choose from here, we can choose any of these in order to make a report. In this case, maybe I want to track the designation, meaning the allocated usage. What we're using this for, based on the count of the total designation and group it by say let's do type of donor and we can have that sorted here. So this is showing us the total number of designated donations grouped by who gave that donation. Maybe I could flip this around and show me, show me the total Donations in this case. And again, if you were talking about traditional for profit sales, this would just be revenue or sales instead of donations. Just swap the words. You got the same thing. So let's just say maybe we want to look at total revenue donations grouped by type of donor. We can break it out this way. And this, whether we show it in a donut chart or a pie chart or something else over time allows us to visualize our information and ultimately answer whatever question we're trying to answer. So quick chat check, because I am. Unfortunately, things are not behaving on our end. I just want to see if anyone has any questions about this kind of basic piece. Chart view. Looks like it's pretty good so far, so I'll just keep on moving on. Our chart view is where we can create one super powerful chart that summarizes one set of data. It typically is done on the app that you're looking to report on. So if I wanted to have a report on donations, I'd make it here. If I wanted to report on contacts, I would create that over here. As you saw at the time of setup, chart views, like all of our views, can be public or private, so we can restrict who sees that particular view if there's a sensitivity. Or maybe it's just going to clutter up other people's views. In addition to chart view, though, there are dashboards in SmartSuite and dashboards in SmartSuite are kind of like charts on steroids. So let's just go ahead and create one so you can see the basic setup here. A dashboard view in SmartSuite once created, looks something like this. This is a flexible canvas where we can not only create simple charts, but also embed information stored elsewhere in smart smartsuite. I know when I first started I was a little confused between the difference of this dashboard versus a chart, but that really is the key piece. The complexity level of the charts you can create right now in a dashboard is quite different than the charts you can create in a chart view. Your best bet in most situations is to create your chart views as standalone views and as I'm about to demonstrate here, embed them. What the heck is that about? Layla, what I mean here is take your view that you created elsewhere with all the superpowers you added and use the embed chart option right here to have that view that's amazing that you've added elsewhere. Select it from the dropdowns available and have it show up on this dashboard as one little piece of a broader report you can create when most people are thinking about reporting, this is the kind of layout that they will be generally working in. Is a dashboard like this where we don't just have one pie chart, one big old chart? No, we typically have multiple moving pieces and the way we add these pieces are through the widgets I just showed you. So one common widget that I think everybody watching this stream will need to understand is the embedded chart view. At least right now it's a really great go to option to give you powerful reports. In addition to that though, there are a lot of other widgets we can incorporate. Widgets spanning from comparison and progress metrics where you can track your progress towards a goal. Charts where you can create simplified chart views, except directly in the dashboard. I know it's confusing, so bear with me. Conferencing which is giving us the ability to have our calls directly inside of SmartSuite, embedded design or outside elements where we can embed, say a figma drawing inside of SmartSuite. We've got more Google features here. Again, more of these kinds of embed views that allow us to view and edit information directly inside of SmartSuite and custom blocks which are going to become super handy. These are the basic building blocks that together we can add into our page to create the report that matches what we need. Once we create the report once, this report will kind of automatically update over time. So let's just say in this hypothetical world we are going to create a report on donors like I'm going to show you here later on if a donor changes, if a donor becomes inactive or active. Every time I go to this dashboard view, I can get up to date information without ever having to set it up again. So I think many of us are used to traditional reporting where you go somewhere, you have a report and you have to click generate report to see the update. Not the case here. This is a real time dashboard status update of what you have selected. So any questions so far about the generalities of a chart view and a dashboard, which are your two main options? All right, so Brad has a question. Unable to be shared as read only though. So dashboards can only be viewed by members. That is true. Okay, so great point here. Right now when we're looking at these dashboards, these are primarily built for member use. So people who are inside a smartsuite, they're going to be working in the tool. This is what these are being used for at this moment in time. I know there is some options around, especially on the record level, having really great options around reporting and exporting and so on. But when it comes to these dashboards they are a little bit focused on the end user use case. However, we can still utilize these in external settings like don't limit yourself here Brad. We could have a situation where we have as I'll show you here later on in the stream. Let's just jump to it now. What if we had something like a board report where we report on our nonprofits events during our monthly board meeting? Well, even though my board members may never log in to SmartSuite, I could still have this up on the screen during the meeting to facilitate the discussion and be basically a living and breathing presentation. I could also invite those board members into SmartSuite depending on what my setup is. And I know that SmartSuite has working on a lot of different things around permissions and guests and different ways to have access. So everything I'm saying right now may also become even easier over time time. But don't limit yourself just by these set definitions. There are still ways to incorporate this so that you can have a living, breathing, dynamic report. I've also seen folks take reports like these and to circumvent kind of the little limitations they will screenshot, they'll share like hey, here's a snapshot on time either by sharing it in a meeting or sending an email. This is only going to get easier over time I expect, but that's currently the flow. Now quick question to jump back into the overview level. Is this the only option for reporting inside of SmartSuite? Is this all we got going on Chart View dashboards? Is that it? Not really. And before we go deeper into the dashboard examples I prepared for you today, I want to highlight the two other options that for folks maybe in Brad's position or anyone else who needs maybe even more power, just want to highlight the other options that are available to you too because I'm an overachiever, so. So our four options for reporting from SmartSuite are the chart View and Dashboard that I spoke about already. And like I said, Dashboard going to be your best friend behind Chart View, but we also have two additional ones which are exports and kind of syncing to outside tools. I don't want to spend a lot of time here, but I want to make sure we're all aware of them in case this is helpful for more sophisticated use cases. So let's just say for some reason, you know, we have our donations inside of SmartSuite, but we need more reporting than just what we can get in a dashboard. Maybe by the time I show you these advanced setups later on you're going to be like, oh, this is great, but I need a pivot table which isn't yet in SmartSuite, something like that. Well, if those situations come up for you, just know getting your data in and out of SmartSuite because it's such a structured database, it's pretty darn easy. You have two options to do so if we were to have say, a view like all donations, we can always take the views that we have here and import or export that information into other apps. So here we've got the import button and we can also export over to the side to different file formats. This basically allows us to have infinite reporting possibilities because not only can we report directly inside SmartSuite for those of us who want the quick fix or. But in addition to that we can also export and put it into a CSV, a spreadsheet, a PDF, whatever. We need to make sure we're keeping stakeholders informed and seeing the data we need to answer the questions we need to ask. In addition to this, there is also the option to use the different ways to connect our solutions together. So up here at the top we have zapier displayed. But I just want to be clear that this is not our only option when it comes to SmartSuite. We have the ability, let me flip onto the right one, to have SmartSuite talk to other tools in real time. So we could set up a sync that says every time a donation is closed, add something into our data summary tool, whatever that is, add something into our reporting thing, send an email to donors, whatever that stuff is that can't be handled in house. We have integrations with SmartSuite to connect through Zapier or through make or through other options to make sure we can get information in whatever format we need. Okay, so I'm going to spend most of today handling the common use case where folks just want to have a dashboard inside a smartsuite. But I thought it made sense to just give you guys that disclaimer that if this is too simple for you, if you're a power user, just know you're not locked in. It's really easy to get information in and out of SmartSuite because it's just so structured and not quite as willy nilly as spreadsheets or some of the more flexible tools out there. So moving on, before we move into the next stage here, I just want to address one other question that might come up, which is what dashboard views do I need? I'M going to show you some examples and it's going to be tempting to say, okay, I need to build that. While I would love that and I hope you do follow along and build some of these, just know that what I'm showing you are examples to determine what dashboard view or view, as I wrote here, you really need. It's going to come back to that flowchart I showed you at the top. Figure out what question you are trying to ask and then we will reverse engineer what that dashboard or something else may need to look like. If you're in a situation like the commenter earlier where it is so important for you to be able to share that given thing with outside stakeholders, the answer to your question may be slightly different than someone who's really focused on having things broken down with severe permissions. But all internally we might need to look at different SmartSuite features or use them in different ways to suit your use case. So for folks who are here in the chat, I would just love to hear are there any specific types of reports you are interested in building in your own workspace? So it could be sales and if so, what question are you trying to ask? It could be marketing. What question are you trying to ask? Let me know in the chat. What question is top of mind for you when it comes to reporting in SmartSuite? I see we've got a little bit of a flicker on the Internet connection here, so I hope we're still going to be doing okay. So I'm going to keep moving on and as I see those comments come in, we'll have them pop up on the screen and we'll keep moving. If, however, you are someone who is not at this point yet, you're not ready to ask a question or let alone get an answer for it, you just want some inspiration. Well, let's get to that. I've whipped up a few example dashboards here in SmartSuite that I want to show you around. These are all going to be built on the donation CRM sales tracking thing that we created last week and it looks something like this. I have created two chart views and two dashboards that summarize a ton of information, including the demo area that I just created here. So let me just clean up those demo pieces and let's talk through them each. First off, let's talk about the development report for board. Now this dashboard I created for the problem of keeping board members up to date. I don't know how many people here who have been on a board or who have worked in a nonprofit. But you know how challenging. Or if not, take my word for it, it can be challenging to keep board members engaged, to keep any kind of volunteer, whether it's a paid position or a volunteer position, to keep anyone really in the loop when they've got so many things going on, their life is challenging. So that challenge of keeping board members up to date without having to spend so much time repeating yourself or writing long emails is what I was trying to solve in this dashboard. The main things I want to hit on here are what a board member really needs to see at a glance in order to effectively participate in the board member meeting. Most often in this example nonprofit, my board members are maybe calling up donors, some high value donors that they might have relationship with and the board is there to hold the team accountable to the goals that the organization has set. So with those goals in mind, this is what the dashboard looks like. First up in the top left corner we have a text widget. This is where we actually have set up just some constant information by typing in and using slash commands to add formatting into a text widget here. Here we have kind of an overview describing things and below that we have helpful links. This is a resource, a form of documentation to make it clear what a board member might need. If we have a backlog of agendas, if we have a list of our brand guidelines, if we have, I don't know, a calendar of upcoming events, we would want to link these here so that they're always there at a quick glance for any board members or the board member member facilitator if they're just sharing the screen. Beyond that we have, if I save this, we've got a contact area in a call out field and then we've got the widgets. This is the stuff you're probably looking forward to. So let me collapse this one just for the sake of focus. Below this we have two other fun widgets. The first one here is a Google meeting. A Google Meet link. This if I just go ahead and make it full screen, this opens a link that allows our board members to join our board meeting. Again, if we were sharing this with our board members as members inside a SmartSuite, this would be a great way to avoid confusion, particularly when you're dealing with board members who maybe aren't as digital calendar friendly. We've got a little note here reminding folks how that is set up. And here is what it looks like. Don't, don't bother joining that meeting. There's nothing there but Save that change. Next to that, we have a countdown widget. This is again, a reminder particularly useful if we have our board members in SmartSuite who again, maybe don't show up for meetings where we can set a time and date. A countdown reminder for when our next event or activity is. We could have this counting down to the end of the fiscal year, the countdown to our next phone drive, the countdown to our next meeting, which is the use case here. But this is a countdown widget inside of SmartSuite. Again, all of these pieces you can set up right up at the top, just by looking for the name in this case, Countdown next to the next meeting or the next. Whatever. Countdown. We've got our goals and this is the accountability section of this dashboard. I'm going to zoom in just a bit so you can see how this dynamically changes sizes, but also so we can all easily see it. The first thing we have on this widget is a progress widget, and this is showing me the progress towards the goal that I have. And this is really helpful for anything where you have kind of a fundraising objective or a thermometer you're working towards. If you're looking for a sense of progress towards a fixed destination, particularly if time is not so important, these kinds of progress widgets are really useful. Looking at this here, we could add this into our account by adding a progress metric widget and calibrating it like so. Actually, let me open up the widget settings. You can see what we've got going on here. And unfortunately I have to zoom slightly out so you can see it here, but it looks something like this. We've got donations app. We're reporting on the metric amount and I've placed my goal manually as $1 million in donations. That is what we've got going on here. As our new donations come in and we have more and more donations that meet the criteria of this given widget, we will see this bar automatically go up. So just to show you an example, let's go back to our donations and let's just pretend that all of a sudden, Angela, you know, she called us up, she said, no, no, no, don't make my donation just 7,500. Make it 17,500. Great. Angela, you're awesome. Wherever you are in this imaginary world, if we go back to that view, we will be able to see this progress move forward towards our goal. This is all based on summing up the amount of the donation field we have in SmartSuite. If you are someone who's Running a sales organization, you would probably want something like this. But for departmental sales goals, this could be number of renewals, this could be number of new contracts, this could be dollar value of contracts. Any concrete goal you have, which if you're in a sales organization, I'm betting you have a metric or two. You could use this widget. I would suggest, if you're setting this up, to consider the time scale and really name this. Clearly there isn't a lot of space to spell out the name. I've about maxed it out here, so you'd want to practice some brevity and just say something like generate 1 million in Q1. Let us know what the time span is. Which I didn't really do a great job of here because it can be a little confusing to know that kind of detail from just the overview. Below this, though, we've got some more details. I'm imagining myself being a busy board member and I've got, you know, I'm seeing the overview and I'm like, oh, that's interesting. I'd like more info if that's the case for us. I have another widget below this. This one, unlike the one above, is actually collapsed by default, which is why it's smushed and minimal and only visible if someone expands it. Someone can expand this widget by clicking the maximize button to the right. And then they see this chart here. This is showing me the same kind of data, but rather than just a cumulative flow, that thermometer that always is getting closer, which is a great overview, this goes one layer deeper. And rather than just looking at the overview, it's looking at each month and where we stand on total donations for that month. Notice this particular chart has a blue line across the top. This is a benchmark field that I have set up inside of SmartSuite to tell me when things are going. Let's go into the settings. I'll show you how this is set up. This particular one is a chart that is created right in the dashboard. So it's a little simpler than a chart view. It's showing me based on the donor relationship management solution, the spot that I'm in, the amount of donations summed up. That's very important because we'd have a very different chart if we were looking at the average and we'd be grouping it by when the donation happened. That's what this field is telling us. Date of donation, grouping it by the time scale of month in this case, although we could break it down further if we wanted to. Or less. And then we have the. The chart total showing up at the top, this thing here that is set by this chart total field. It's a bit confusing, I think, or at least it was to me what chart total meant. I thought it meant like, are you limiting it to a max value? Does this determine my axis? No, it's just a summary area that shows up at the top above the title. So we could add a ton of different things here. Amount, number of comments that are open for some reason. But for us, we're going to stick with total amount because that's what we reported on before. Finally we have the benchmark line and this is where we're taking our annual goal. And we are manually typing in the number that is equivalent to that goal. So if we want to make a million, it's going to be 83,000 per month, which is where that line is coming from. If I change this line to say 53,000, we can adjust our math. Let me Change it to 23,000 so you can see the apparent change there. And we can also change the color just in case you want to make it green for some reason. There you go. That is our details chart. And you're going to see another bar chart similar to this later on. That'll go a bit faster through, but that's how that works. These combination of a summary and details is a great way to give people a quick glance and the opportunity to dive deeper. And we'll see more of that in the second dashboard example I have to follow below this we have our second goal for the organization, which is increasing our average donation size. Here our goal is to have our average donation be 5,000 or higher. And hey, we've met it, which is why it is turning orange, which is the setting that we have set in the setup of this given widget. This is set in a very similar way. It's using our progress tracker here. We've got the amount as the value, we've got our goal number typed in and we've got save changes. This is very similar to what we showed up at the top right here. Both of these are expanded by default. If there's any questions in the chat about these ones, let me know. I know this is a lot of stuff I'm throwing at you, so I'm sure we'll get some questions coming in if there's anything tricky here. Here we go. Time tracking reports. Oh, yes. Okay. Time tracking reports. We actually have some stuff for you. Stefani. Check out the the live stream from two weeks ago where we talked about capacity management. We've got some good stuff on time estimates and time reporting. Not quite a traditional timesheet, but I do think it'll help you with that use case. But for now let's go back to goal two here. So we've got increase average donation. So oops, sorry, let me back up a second here. This is goal two. This is our overview. And just like before, we're going to have an overview, then we'll have details. So if our board member wants more info, they can have the option to maximize this. And look what we've got. Another chart. This one you understand the application of. It's very similar to the last one, except rather than looking at the sum of our donation amounts, we're looking at the average. And then our, our benchmark is the average that we are trying to aim for. So we were under, we were under, we were over. And our overall we, our average is now over thanks to Angela changing her donation amount. So that's what this one is. Nothing crazy different than what we've seen before. But again it answers the question of how are we doing on that goal so our board members can hold us accountable. Below this we have a third goal and this is one around keep increasing the percentage of corporate gifting. If we are in a traditional sales organization, this may look a little bit different, but right now we're talking about the types of buyers we have. So in this case, how many of our donors, what percentage of our gifts are coming from corporate givers versus individuals or funds or trusts or grants? Same thing in a for profit environment, right? What percentage of our buyers are in the real estate industry? What percentage of our buyers are one person shops? What percentage of our buyers are over 5 million in revenue? Whatever the metrics are for you, this is reporting on that distribution to make sure that we're not too focused on one area and that we're growing different segments of our audience. So in this case we are looking at what percentage of our people are coming from corporate donations. And our goal is 50%. As you can see in this bar chart, we are over that percentage. Finally though, we have one more little widget here that's tucked in the bottom and unfortunately my face is blocking it. So I'll just get rid of myself for a moment here and show you the phone bank one. If I expand this and I'm actually going to go to full screen to make it really big, this is one that is actually a little different than the other reports we've seen. Normally when we've talked about reports so far, we've been talking about them from the lens of some summarizing data. But sometimes when we create a report, we don't just want to summarize data, we want to find the data. And that's where SmartSuite's views can kind of marry with reporting and create something like this. What we have here is a phone bank contact list. Anyone worked in a nonprofit, you probably know how many times you've had to create something like this. But this is basically a report saying, hey donors or sorry, hey board members. These are the donors we need you to get in touch with. If you know these folks, we'd really like to get their support. For some reason or another. They've donated to us in the past, but they've kind of fallen off the bandwagon, those kinds of things. This is a little different in that it's set up as a view in SmartSuite that is public and then embedded inside this dashboard. Let me show you what that looks like here and how it's set up. I believe it's over here in the contacts area. Here we are. Yep, we have a view. Just a regular view, not a dashboard, not a chart, nothing. Just a view that is filtered to only show us larger donations where someone hasn't donated within a certain time span, meaning they've maybe been inactive a little bit. And we have them sorted by the size of the donations that they've given so far. So it's prioritized. And this is what we have shared as a shared view. We'll turn that off momentarily so you can see what it looks like when it's off. Then I'm going to turn it on. This link then is what I have embedded inside that dashboard. It's a real time updated list of who our board members need to keep in mind, get in touch with or champion our cause for to connect with these donors. This is a living and breathing call list as opposed to the Excel spreadsheets that I know many nonprofits, you know, we're constantly whipping those up and creating versions that are always outdated. Let's skip that and have an updated in real time report for an application to a non nonprofit example, which I know is our theme for this particular series or that segment of the series. But I know not all of us are in nonprofits, myself included. To translate this to that list, we could translate this to something like former client contact list, ideal partner contact list. I'm sorry, my face is blocking it again. We would just change the Meaning here. But the intent is the same. We're giving a report for key stakeholders to know who we want to connect with. This could be Dream Sponsors, this could be Dream Partners, Dream clients, ex clients, whomever. Overall, this is intended to do the job as I set out at the beginning. Give us the data we need to answer the question, has the executive team, has the nonprofit accomplished the goals and what can I as a board member do to help? And when do I need to be there to do that helping? That is what this does in a nutshell. Any questions here on the chat before I move on to our second example, which is actually going to be taking the same sales reporting scenario of, you know, what are our numbers and flipping it for a different audience. A different problem to solve by looking at how the internal team of, say a non profit or a sales team could use the same data to focus on the info they need to have. Preeti asks, okay, we are a firm of public accountants. Examples of dashboards we would need are to reflect the status of progress on various various audits and the work status of each audit to each client. Oh, perfect. Okay. So I think, Preeti, you're actually going to like this next example. Unless there's any other pressing questions. I guess I'll move on to that next one. Oh, okay, here's another one. Rachel says, can you pull goals from another table or is it so static number the only option. So for our total goals, if that's what we're talking about here, such as here, where we've got 1 million right now, how these are set up is indeed static. So I'm typing this in here. So whatever it is, when you set your annual plan of what you want to have achieved, you would be typing that in at this point. It's kind of like a goal setting. If we wanted to have something where we are comparing two fields together, we could do that in SmartSuite, but it would be done in a slightly different way and would likely be a either a chart with multiple values being added so we'd have like a goal and then an actual so two bars next to each other where we could see them at each point in time. Or we'd use things like relationships and formulas based on those or a formula where we'd have the fields added for each. We've got three different options for how to execute that. But in terms of this particular progress metric widget here, this one is requiring a fixed typed value as of now. I guess this is a good time to tell everybody or remind everybody that SmartSuite is in this, you know, the fun stage of software companies where so many things are being developed every week. It's not one of those slow goliaths at this point. And so to find out what's coming in the smartsuite world, you can check out their kanyboard and find out what is coming up next. I wouldn't be surprised if we saw things like this changing and to get updates on that, besides just subscribing to this channel, which you know, kind of recommend, they also have a great community that you can subscribe to that'll give you email alerts just around the things you care about. So not, you know, we all get those marketing emails, not those things. I think they can be great. But personally I think their community approach is a little bit more targeted and a nice way to get updates on things like this that might matter most to you. That's my go to way to get updated. So I hope that helps answer that question. Any other questions here on the onset before we move on? Nope. Okay, cool. So let me go back to that question we had before Carly. If you could pull it back up about reporting on workload from Preeti, I think perfect. So for this kind of question, I want to get to our second dashboard because I think this will really hit on this. We want to see where the status of progress is and what's the work status on each client. So you can go ahead and remove that banner now, Carly. Thank you. Let me show you what this looks like. Like I know this mock up is focused on a more development use case scenario, but I'll just be up front and say you can easily adapt this to the status of a project, the status of a client. Just flip out some of the words, but the setup is going to be almost identical. Let's show you what this looks like. Removing my face so you can actually see something here. We have two columns in this case focused on the two major goals that the core team in this case is focused on. At the very top we have the same kind of report we saw before where we have the totals or the sums of the given goal. I'm not going to break those down again because you already saw them. But do notice that in this team focused view, I actually have these collapsed by default. I could even change the color of these too if I wanted to, to make them a little bit less pronounced. But what these are for is if our team ever wants to get a glance at the big picture, we have that information here. However, unlike the board View. My main expanded prioritized area is far more zoomed in in these team applications. I'm not focused as much as a team member on are we at a million yet? That doesn't mean anything. Anyone here who has a team? Actually, let me check that real quick. Does anyone here have a team? If so, how big is your team? Anyone over 5, 10, 50, 100? Yeah. So anyone in these boats, you would have experienced the reality that a team of two is going to care more about these big picture numbers than a team of 200 where the average worker is kind of just focused on their stuff, their zone of genius. And that's what we have our widgets kind of shifted for. The main focus of these dashboards is not the big picture. That would be more of the executive leadership's responsibility. But on the week to week, day to day zoomed in. So here we have a comparison widget in place here that's showing us gifts year over year or week over week in this case, if I can speak correctly. So week over week, how this is set up just to show you is using a comparison widget setting up the app of donations. Oh, perfect. So we've got Brad teams five to 20. I saw a team of three earlier on. Great. And we're going to select the metric of value of the amount here because again we're reporting on the same numbers. We're going to actually compare it if I click the right thing on date of donation. And we're going to compare it based on the weekly time frame versus this week versus last week. This is keeping things super tactical. We could change this to other timescales if we wanted to, like monthly or daily. Obviously these numbers are a little ridiculous because it is a demo account, but this is allowing our team to just focus in on donations and when they're accrued in the in the moment basis. If we are somebody like the example earlier where we are focused not on revenue, maybe we're an internal fulfillment team. The same metric could work for you, but you'd want to flip it rather than focusing on dollars value. Maybe it's count of new clients, maybe it's total projects closed. Maybe it's if we're an accountant, maybe it's maybe we're tax accountant. How many tax returns were filed this week versus last week? Week. The metric is going to change here depending on your priorities and your goal. But the setup could be the same. Moving below that, we have something that's closer again to that example earlier, which is talking about more of the tactical Task level in the question that was asked, it was around, you know, how many audits do we still have to do? Well, same kind of thing applies here, except I'm focused on thank you cards. Because in a donation environment, in a development team, that's often the biggest task. Kind of like when you are in a for profit and you have an order come in and you have to fulfill the order. In many development teams it's you receive a donation and you have to thank the donation and give receipts and stuff like that. So this is basically our fulfillment tracker. What this is, well, it might be something that looks familiar. This is an embedded view just like the one I showed you earlier. But in this case we're just showing people that we need to thank them for their donation. When we thank them, we can fill out this field here by opening this up, going down to wherever the thank you sent is, checking that and then they will get removed from this particular view. How this is created is the same as what you've seen before where it's an embedded view generated from an area we have in SmartSuite. In this case, the donations to thank view. Here's what it looks like and here's how it's set up. Very simple, but a great way to have kind of a touch point on key project milestones. You could also do this for any other part of your process you want to incentivize. So this could be something like number of orders that still need to be shipped. This could be number of audits that need to be filed. This could be number of new clients that are waiting to be onboarded. Any total process or sub step of a process that you want to optimize. Report on Gamify. You could incorporate this kind of flow. You just need to define what the chunk is for you, what are you trying to improve or bring awareness to and then report on that. In this case we really, for us fulfillment is mainly sending these darn cards. And so getting these filled out and having them hide from this view, that's what progress looks like for us. And do notice as I fill this out and I check that little box, they do hide from the view based on the filters I have in place. So it's just hiding them if they're synced. Don't worry though, they still always show up in our other views. We have everything all grouped together. Okay, moving on down the road, we've got thank you backlog. So let's just say we're like some people and we have backlogs of things Like I know certain YouTuber that may have a backlog of YouTube comments she's, you know, still trying to work through. Sorry, but if that's a goal for you, reporting on that is also something we can do in a chart view. I talked previously about how thank you cards are part of fulfillment for a development team. Well, if that's something we're trying to get better and better about, tracking the amount of thanks we have to send still on a given basis could be a valuable way to incentivize quickly sending thank yous. We could do that by counting the number of days it takes to send it. We could do it by having a report like this, and this particular one is just a column chart with two separate values being tracked of the thank you sent count and grouping by the date of donation by month. Pretty basic, but our goal here is to keep these all green. And as you can see, this donation or this development team is a little bit behind on that one. If they're still doing thank yous from December over to the right side, we flip to our other goal. Right, Our other thing that we're trying to aim for. And in this case, we've got average gifts this month. One thing I did not do that I should is specify what our goal here is. Because I'm using a comparison widget here, it is not actually allowing me to go ahead and have that particular total show up. So it's not counting down. See, there we go. So in order to have this happen, we need to make sure we have this in the actual widget title itself, where we have it saying, hey, Our goal is 5,000 and we're at 8,500. How amazing. I wish I knew who to attribute this to. But the whole thing of having a dashboard is really important. But having a dashboard where it's clear whether you're winning or losing is more important. Yeah, that's the case here. This is the same setup as the previous one, but just to briefly show you, it looks something like this. And the settings are as follows. Moving on down, we've got donations by owner. This is where we get into more of the salesy stuff. Let's say we are trying to optimize for or improve our process as it relates to donations based on a given relationship owner. So, for example, maybe we have, you know, a few people that are working on things. And I'm going to make this full screen so you can see it. We've got Montana, we've got Melissa, we've got Monica, we've got Layla. We've got. We've got all these people, right? And just like a sales team, we want to know which of these people is really putting in the work or getting the results rather, because we all know results are not equivalent to work. But in this case, what I'm doing is creating a chart that shows me just that it's color coded based on how many donations in terms of dollars that have been generated by person, by type of donor. This is important for our goal because we're really trying to change our donation size. And we know different donors give different amounts based on some of the other charts. So let's just try to figure out who's really getting the biggest results and what kind. For example, if we see here that Montana is doing a great job getting public charity donations, maybe we specialize in there. Maybe that's a great space for Montana to thrive. If Layla is doing pretty well at personal but much better at corporate, maybe Layla's focus could be more on the corporate side because that seems to be a strength where she's getting disproportional results. This chart is a little tricky to set up. So I'm going to show you what this looks like for any curious eyes. This is actually one of those embedded chart views I told you about earlier. What that looks like is going back over to this particular view. This is a chart view that I created separately. Now, remember back at the beginning where I said chart views are where we have the most power. Well, things like the heat map chart I'm showing you here are a perfect example of that. We cannot create this chart just by adding it to a dashboard, but we can add this chart as part of a chart view. And so that's what we're doing here. We have a heat map selected. We are color coding based on the amount, in this case the amount of the donation. We've got categories, meaning the X and Y based on the relationship owner, which is maybe like your sales rep or your account manager. And then we have the type, which is the type of donor. If we wanted to change this, we could change this to so many other things. If we prefer to optimize for a different piece. For example, maybe we just want to say who's sending their thank you cards. Or maybe we want to know, you know, what is, I don't know, the gift name. We could break it down by person, but in this case, we're grouping it by type. Our chart tool in this case is showing us the total donation amount. And we could add dynamic filters if we wanted but once we have this chart view set up, as you see here, all we've done on our actual dashboard is embed this chart using the the embed chart widget right here. It's a little confusing because it's found in its own area, but it's not too hard. You just add the link that you generated earlier and you are good to go. Any questions on this piece so far? I'll check the chat real quick because I know it's a little delayed. We'll see once, twice, sold. Okay, well let's keep on moving then move on to the next thing. So once we have kind of donations by owner, let's look at donations by donor type because that's something we grouped by before. Here we can see a chart of how many donations we have per type of donor to show where that average is. In this case we can see on average our corporate donors give a larger amount per donation. So if our goal is to have a larger amount per donation, maybe we could focus more on corporate donors and maybe less on private foundations. Again, another chart here. How this is working is by pulling in the donation amount average for each type of donor and then showing the benchmark again, which is 5,000 what we're aiming for on average. Keep on moving, keep on moving. We have got our donations by type and designation. Similar kind of heat map chart except this time rather than focusing on people, we're focused on types of donors and what causes they donate to. In this case we know corporate donors are giving the most. What are they giving the most to? Well, in this case we know they're giving the most to vaccination centers and we know public charities are giving the most to the boys and girls. I think it's boys and girls club. It's cut off here but boys and girls something. That's where our public charity donation folks are focused. And personal donations are very focused on women's health. This might help us if we want to focus more on corporate donors to focus maybe more of our marketing on the development side on vaccination centers. When it comes to non nonprofit examples, we are maybe going to shift this and we might be breaking things down by type of service they're buying and what type of person is buying that service. So moving on to this one, the last thing I'm going to do is another embed view here, donors to reconnect with. This is another widget in our report that's giving us that action list. Remember how I showed you on the the board side that we had the list of donors we wanted to get in touch with. Well, we can do the same thing for our team. In this case, we're showing the same kind of list, suggesting that folks get in touch or be proactive about getting in touch with a given client or a given type of person in our orbit. Here we've got contact information and so on, which is again an embedded ur. At the end of the day, I could show you a million different examples of dashboards like this and ways you can use notes and comments and embeds and charts and graphs to show you amazing reports that you can create inside of SmartSuite. But at the end of the day, it's really going to be down to the question you need to ask. I'm just going to loop us back full circle here. When we are trying to create a dashboard on anything, it all starts with a good question. What problem are we trying to solve? Saying we need to use a feature because we need to use a feature. That's not a problem, that's shiny object syndrome. Instead we need a question. Is it how can we make sure that Melissa sells more corporate sales? Is it who is doing the most corporate giving? Is it who is our top donor? Is it who do we need to call today? Is it are we going to make our goals or not? We need a question. And once we have that question, we can ask that to ourselves, to our peers. If you're a process driven member, you could ask to the process driven coaches and then we can reverse engineer from there. What report will give you that answer by making sure first we track the data we need, then we review the data we get and finally we answer the ultimate question. And hey, if it doesn't work out, we just get better data. And we repeat this until we have clear and decisive guidance as to where we need to head next. That's a sold reminder again. Now I want to check back in on our agenda here. So far we have covered what reports do you need? The ones that answer questions. And we've also toured the sales tracking dashboard examples for two different perspectives. Taking the use case of a nonprofit, but as I said, a nonprofit is not the only people who can benefit from this example. If you are an accountant, if you are a business coach, if you are a service provider, look at the metrics that relate to sales for you. Normally it's number of customers, revenue from customers, lifetime value of customers, and so on. Get that data into SmartSuite. The reporting options become pretty infinite once you get that step. If you're not sure about how to get started on this piece, I really suggest you watch our previous videos about how to set up database structures and remember that you can always easily import information to make the process even faster. If you're someone that needs a little bit extra support. If this is feeling a bit exciting, but maybe overwhelming, just know that we are here to help as well. Check out the description of our YouTube version of this stream to find out how you can work with us on this. We actually have a little some exciting stuff coming soon and there's a little wait list you can join to be the first to know when that announcement drops. Which hint hint is sooner versus later and the last thing I want to just ask or share before I take some questions, if there are any, is hey, did you guys enjoy this? Was this helpful? Let me know with a yes or a no in the chat if you'd like to see more live streams like this from the channel. Typically we produce short term, short to medium length Tutorials focused on SmartSuite process Other tools in the space. But we're experimenting and SmartSuite has been such a gracious sponsor to allow us to experiment by giving you this live format so you can ask your questions. But we reached the end. We've gone through four live streams somehow in what feels like seconds and we're approaching the end and so I would like to know from the chat would you like to see more like this? Just write yes or no or I mean you don't have to write no I guess that would be weird. But just write yes if you're in favor or if you'd rather see more short form shorts, that kind of stuff, let us know. The last thing I'll just ask is there any other questions Carly, in the chat that I might have missed from today? So far, nothing pressing. Awesome. Well in that case I just want to say thank you guys so much for joining us here. If you haven't already, please do use our affiliate link to subscribe. Sign up for SmartSuite. Check it out for yourself. You can trial some of the templates I'm using in this video, customize them to your own use case by following the templates inside of SmartSuite for free and checking out our live stream from last week. Thank you guys so much for taking some time out of your day to go through this with me. And until next time, you know the drill. Enjoy the process. Bye everybody.