Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Professional or higher, Explore Professional or higher |
| Access | Agent |
Two people, one dashboard, different figures. Five causes, and none of them is the reporting being broken.
Why does my colleague see different numbers?
- 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, and different weeks
Explore renders in the time zone on each reader's own profile, not the account's. Two people therefore get genuinely different renderings of the same report, and around midnight and month end that moves real tickets between days.
The week is the second half of this and easier to miss. Which day a week starts on follows the reader's own language setting, so two colleagues can pull the same weekly figure and be counting a different seven days. Check both settings before comparing anything reported per week.
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.
On Explore Professional and Enterprise, a sync starts an hour after the previous one finished, at a randomised moment within that hour, and a large account can take more than two hours to finish. So "an hour apart" is enough to explain a difference. One catch to know about: if nobody opens a report or dashboard for 30 days, the refresh drops to weekly until somebody does.
Four: they are not allowed to see the same data
The cause nobody guesses. When a dashboard is shared, restrictions are set per person or group, so two colleagues can open the same dashboard and legitimately see different figures according to their Explore access. Nothing on screen announces it.
If the difference is stable, survives matching filters and looks like a whole group missing on one side, this is it.
Five: 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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