Designing Dashboards

Financial dashboards typically provide an overview by showing summary data. The versatility of dashboards enables you to chart, evaluate, highlight, comment on, and even change key business data. For example, you can change a driver such as Volume in a form that is in a dashboard and immediately see its impact in other forms and charts:

You can create a dashboard by selecting existing data forms and external artifacts such as comments or an external URL. You can specify a chart type to display the data, for example, a Pie chart, bar chart, or other chart type.

Note:

For details on Task Manager and Supplemental Data Manager Overview and Compliance dashboards, see "Monitoring Dashboards" in Working with Financial Consolidation and Close.

To create a Financial dashboard:

1. On the Home page, from Dashboards, click Financial.
2. Click Create.
3. Enter a dashboard name.
   • To change the default dashboard name, click its name, and enter a new name in the input box.
   • To give the dashboard a title with custom formatting, click Settings, clear Use name as title, and then enter the title and set formatting the dialog box.
   • When a new dashboard is created, the borders are hidden by default. To show borders, in Settings, change the Borders setting to Show.
4. From the design palette on the left, drag and drop objects onto the dashboard canvas.
   Select from these objects:

   Table 10-1 Dashboard Objects

   Object	Description
   Forms	Select simple forms to include in the dashboard by navigating the forms folders or by searching for them by name. The access permissions set for forms are honored in dashboards.
   Chart Types	Select the chart types to include in the dashboard. When first added, a selected chart has sample data. You then associate it with a form as its data source. When you link a chart to a form, users can immediately see the impact of changing data in the form on the associated charts. The Combination chart type alternates displaying row data with vertical bars and lines in the chart. For example, the data in row 1 of a form is displayed as a bar and the data in row 2 as a line, with alternating chart types for even and odd-numbered rows. Although the Combination chart type can display up to 20 rows of data, it’s particularly useful when you want to compare two categories of data. For example, you want to compare Germany and France’s average exchange rates over several years, so the form has Germany rates in row 1 of the form, and France’s rates are in row 2. For information on the Gauge chart type, see About the Gauge Chart Type.
   Tile	Sometimes called performance tiles, a tile is a chart type that lets you select specific values from the cube to display. See About the Tile Chart Type.
   Commentary	Select External Artifacts, and then Commentary. Enter text that explains the data or charts.
   URL	Dynamic web page summary. Select External Artifacts, and then URL. Insert only external site URLs starting with the https:// security protocol. Don't use internal or relative URLs or URLs for unconsenting third party sites such as google.com.

5. Customize the dashboard using the dashboards settings and the objects’ hover toolbar, and then click Save.
   See About Your Dashboard's Layout.

You can easily duplicate and modify a dashboard using Copy As on the Dashboard list page. Select the dashboard, and then click Actions.