Dashboards are a quick and faster way for any organization to know the real-time data flow of the business. They provide quick information in different formats like graphs, charts, list and pipelines and give clear pictorial representation. Dashboards helps to analyse the current business and help organizations understand the overall performance.
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Dashboards in SugarCRM – Introduction
SugarCRM by default provides few dashboards which help users to have a quick understanding of Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities, Activity stream and activities like scheduled calls, meetings etc. Users who are currently logged in can view the list of dashboards.
How dashboards help in business organisations
Depending upon the area of use, dashboards play an important role in different departmental processes like sales opportunities, project updates, service management, client monitoring, each of these departments needs dashboards in day-to-day business activities.
Dashboard for tracking sales opportunities
Sales dashboards allow users to look over various aspects of the sales process through its life-cycle, we can keep track of all details regarding top sales opportunities, with configurable dashboards, the sales department can compare the growth and revenue from time to time.
Dashboards are also useful to a person in a managerial position who needs to present sales data during quarterly and annual meetings without maintaining multiple excel sheets.
Dashboard for project updates
In any organisation, project management is a critical job role that is for higher levels of reporting, and better resource utilization. A project manager needs to prepare details of reports on project completion schedules, team structure, status and keep senior management up-to-date. with project management dashboards, it is possible to get all the above details in an organisation.
Dashboard for service management
Every company needs to deal with customer complaints and maintain a track of support calls and complaints on a monthly basis. With a dashboard, it is easy to analyze and improve service efficiency. Listing customer complaints based on their priority level will help users to concentrate on high priority tasks with respect to time constraints.
Understanding SugarCRM dashboards and dashlets
Having understood what dashboards are, let us deep-dive into how this functionality works within SugarCRM.
- Dashlets allow users to build specific data and be used in views for data visualizations.
- Dashlets live within dashboards and are available on the Home page and as well as list view and record views. Let’s have a look at one of the defaults SugarCRM dashboard
- Here in the above screenshot, we can see a dashboard named “Activities table” along with two dashlets that are “Planned activities”, “Active tasks”.
- It lists the planned activities and active tasks based on the logged-in user which helps users to quickly know what they are working and what next they have to work which reduces the time delays and increases the work efficiency.
- Now, let us look at how we can create dashboards in SugarCRM.
How to create Dashboard in SugarCRM
The following steps cover creating a new dashboard named “Sales Dashboard”
- Dashboards can be created at the Home page, list and record views.
- Click on the drop-down icon of the Home button.
- Click on “Create dashboard”
- The below screen will be shown below.
- Provide the name of the dashboard
- Select the number of columns.
- Click on the Add dashlet button. The below screen will be shown.
- Select the dashlet that you want to add and click on the “save” button. You can also search for a specific dashlet from the search option.
- Select the number of rows you want to display.
- Selecting Yes for “Process Email Templates” will show the logged in users process mail Items.
- You can configure/change these details anytime by click on the settings button in the dashlet.
- In the above screenshot, we can see process email templates created by current logged in users.
Web dashlet
Web dashlet provides functionality to provide a view of the external URL, the page that is associated with the URL will be rendered in the dashlet.
- Select the web page dashlet. The below screen will be shown.
- Enter the URL of the web page and click on the Save button.
- Select the number of rows. It represents the height of the dashlet.
Benefits of Dashboards in SugarCRM
- Dashboards allow users to quickly analyse data through visualizations.
- Visualizations include Listviews, web resources.
- Dashboards help us access areas of concern or action steps.
- Sales teams use CRM dashboards to provide important information about aspects of the sales process like where deals are at in your pipeline.
- Dashboards in CRM give information about upcoming tasks, incoming leads, customer communications.
Dashboards are primary for any organisation, it is used to manage business performance and reports are often shown to provide a quick and easy overview of current business performance.
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