Managing work without clear numbers is like steering a ship with the instruments painted over. To understand what is really happening, managers often have to piece the picture together manually. That means checking reports, opening different projects, or asking teammates for status updates. All of that takes time and attention that could be better spent making decisions.
That’s why we added dashboards directly to Planner, so the metrics that matter are always right where you work.
What Dashboards Are and Why They Matter
Think of a dashboard like the instrument panel in a car. After all, you don’t open the fuel tank to check how much gas you have. You just glance at the panel and immediately know what to do next. Business works much the same way.
In practice, dashboards solve several everyday management problems:
- Instant visibility. You get the information you need in seconds and always know where a company, team, or project stands.
- Shared team focus. When the most important numbers are visible in the main workspace, everyone understands the current direction, including what goal you are moving toward, whether the plan is on track, and where the bottleneck is. This helps keep the team aligned without yet another meeting.
- Early warning signs. Dashboards help you catch anomalies before they turn into bigger problems. If open bugs suddenly spike or call conversion drops, you see it right away, not at the end of the month results review.
- Less uncertainty. When everything is visible on one screen, there is less need for micromanagement and fewer “where are we with…” messages in your team chats.
Where to Find Dashboards in Planfix
We deliberately avoided placing dashboards in a separate section that you would have to open manually. Instead, we added them directly to your Planners.
In fact, there is now a new menu item for adding a Planner list: Widget. This is the basic building block of a dashboard. It’s essentially a visual element that shows the metric you need at a glance.
In this first release, we prepared two widget formats for different management needs.
Large Number: For When One Metric Matters Most
Managers usually don’t need complex charts, but a fast answer to a specific question. How many unread support requests are waiting right now? How much have we spent on marketing this month? How many releases have we shipped?
The Large number widget is built to answer these quickly by displaying a single large, high-contrast number you can read instantly.
Pie Chart: For When Breakdown Matters
Sometimes the total number matters less than what it consists of. Where is our traffic coming from? How are bugs distributed by severity? What share of the budget goes to each advertising channel?
A Donut Chart is ideal for showing proportions, which help provide answers to questions like these. It includes a legend and labels, so you can quickly see how resources, tasks, or other data are distributed.
Where Widgets Get Their Data
When building this tool, we started with a simple reality: company data is not always neatly stored in one system. Some of it lives in Planfix, some is spread across external tools, and some may still be sitting on a manager’s sticky note.
That is why widgets offer two ways to add data: automatically, directly from Planfix, and manually.
Data from Planfix: For Processes Already Tracked in the System
If the metric you need can be calculated from tasks, contacts, or data tags in Planfix, the system handles it automatically.
All you need to do is just set up the logic the same way you would configure a regular task filter.
Where this helps:
- Current overdue tasks. A manager opens Planner and immediately sees 12. This indicates the number of tasks currently past their deadlines. There’s no need for them to open filters or count anything manually. The number is large and red, so the signal is clear: it is time to take action. Something went wrong, and you see it immediately.
- Team workload by project. Let’s assume you are managing a project and want to see how work is distributed across the team. A donut chart shows the breakdown: Dave has 40% of the tasks, Abby has 15%, and three other team members each have 15%. You can quickly see that Dave is overloaded, while someone else still has capacity. Without the chart, you might only notice the imbalance after deadlines start slipping.
Manual Entry: For Metrics from Outside Systems
Creating a complex API integration just to pull one number from a specialized tool is rarely worth the effort. Entering that number manually can take less than a minute.
- Monthly revenue. Revenue may come from several sources, including cash register payments, bank transfers, and online payments through your website. Pulling all of that data automatically would require a complex integration. But entering one final number once a day is quick. Every morning when you open the Planner, you’ll see yesterday’s revenue right away.
- Ad spend by platform. A marketer runs campaigns on Telegram, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook, and pays Instagram influencers directly. Since each platform has its own ad account and billing, while influencer payments are often handled separately, pulling all of this data through an API would be a separate project. Entering four numbers once a week takes about five minutes. The chart immediately shows which platform takes the largest share of the budget, and when you compare it with new leads, it becomes much easier to see whether that channel is paying off.
Who Can Edit Manual Data?
Data accuracy is critical, so we added flexible access settings for all widgets with manual entry.
This way, you can choose exactly which employee or group of employees can edit the values. If you choose not to configure this, editing rights will remain with the administrator only.
This way, everyone is responsible for their own area: the warehouse manager updates stock levels, the marketer enters ad spend from external platforms, and HR updates the budget for a company event. All the while, the data stays current, and the process remains transparent.
A Few Tips for Getting Started
Don’t try to cover everything at once or rush in too fast. The tool is new, so you may want to test all its possibilities right away. However, adding 20 charts on day one is rarely useful. A dashboard should focus attention, not split it.
We recommend you start with the three most important numbers for your business, then add more as needed.
Later, when you have more metric widgets, separate them into strategic and operational groups. Strategic metrics work well in the main dashboard for executives, while operational metrics are better shown to the employees who work with them every day.
Don’t be afraid to experiment! Feel free to move widgets around, remove what you no longer need, and create new ones.
What’s Coming in Future Updates
The widgets you see now are the first basic dashboard widgets. We will keep expanding them, and we are already working on the next one: Plan/Actual. With it, you will be able to enter the plan manually, while Planfix will automatically calculate the actual result.
For example, you could set a target of 500 sales. Planfix will then calculate the actual result, such as 320 sales closed. Right there, you also see the completion percentage: 64%.
Want to see how it works in your own processes? Try Planfix and build dashboards around the metrics that matter to your team.
More visual formats are coming too, including histograms and classic bar charts for tracking data over time.
To help us better understand what you need, we encourage you to tell us in the comments what else you would find useful on a dashboard.
