Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Professional or higher, Explore Professional or higher |
| Access | Agent |
Two people, one dashboard, different figures. Four causes, and none of them is the reporting being broken.
Symptoms
- Two people quote different numbers from the same dashboard.
- A figure in a meeting does not match the one somebody screenshotted.
One: different filter settings
Dashboard filters are per reader. One person left the date on last month and the other set it to last week, and the dashboard looks identical otherwise.
Ask both to say what their filters are set to. This is the cause most of the time.
Two: different time zones
Reports use the account time zone, but a reader in another zone reads boundaries differently, and around midnight and month end that moves real tickets.
Three: refreshed at different moments
One opened it before the refresh and one after. Both were right when they looked. Check the timestamp on each.
Four: a screenshot from last week
Numbers in slides and messages have no date attached. A figure quoted from a screenshot is a figure from whenever that screenshot was taken.
How to settle it
Open the dashboard together, agree the filters out loud, and read the number. Comparing recollections goes nowhere.
How to prevent it
- Set sensible defaults on every dashboard filter.
- Put the period in the report title.
- Show the refresh time.
- Schedule the report by email so everybody discusses the same copy.
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