Dashboards vs. Reports – Which Do You Need? l Sisense (2024)

FAQs

Dashboards vs. Reports – Which Do You Need? l Sisense? ›

Generally, dashboards are optimal for everyday analytics and BI needs, while reports are useful to capture static data. Furthermore, dashboards are ideal for compartmentalization and better monitoring of specific metrics and functions. In the end, which reporting tool you use depends on what you need at the moment.

Dashboards are useful for monitoring, measuring, and analyzing relevant data in key areas. They take raw data from many sources and clearly present it in a way that's highly tailored to the viewer's needs—whether you're a business leader, line of business analyst, sales representative, marketer, and more.

Choose a reporting tool that's right for you

You can keep track of your KPIs using reports or dashboards. Dashboards provide at-a-glance, dynamic, high-level information. Reports are often the longer, more in-depth summaries about how the business has performed in a specific past period.

Dashboards are great for an everyday overview of what's going on in the business thanks to its interactivity and timeliness of real-time updated data, while reports are best for a more in-depth look at a particular data-set, which can provide deeper insight than an at-a-glance summary.

Reports tend to be broader and feature historic data. Because they must be delivered periodically, they represent a snapshot of a specific area or organization rather than its real-time situation. Dashboards, on the other hand, are built to visualize and organize data in real-time.

A dashboard is an information management tool that receives data from a linked database to provide data visualizations. It typically offers high-level information in one view that end users can use to answer a single question.

Dashboard reporting is a visual representation of your company's key performance indicators (KPIs). Using data from other reports, dashboard visuals provide charts and graphs to give an at-a-glance vision of your company's performance.

Each dashboard can support a maximum of 20 components. The same report can be used for one or multiple components.

What type of report Cannot be used to run a dashboard report? ›

The tabular format cannot be used for generating dashboards. Summary report: It is the most common type of report. It allows for the grouping of rows of data and supports sorting as well as displaying subtotals.

The data needs of modern BI users has evolved past what dashboards can provide, leading to a bold proclamation they are dead. The reality? The dashboard's role isn't over - but its decline is helping usher in a new wave of analytics solutions.

Dashboards can help users monitor operations, optimize processes, and improve overall business performance by having data readily available, and can also help detect and prevent potential problems before they become issues with its use of real time data.