Analytics dashboard improvements
Internal and client-facing reporting on SLA, transactions, tax, YOY movement and channel consumption.
PROBLEM
Dashboards answered questions nobody was asking. Stakeholders exported to Excel and rebuilt their own views, which is the clearest possible signal of a reporting failure.
HYPOTHESIS
The export behaviour reveals the real question. Whatever people rebuild by hand is the view that should have existed.
RESEARCH
Interviewed the actual consumers of each report, collected the spreadsheets they were maintaining privately, and mapped them back to available fields.
DATA USED
Power BI usage · exported report requests · SLA and transaction tables · finance reconciliation needs
DECISION MAKING
Cut charts rather than added them. Every panel had to answer a question a named person actually asked in the last month.
SOLUTION
Rebuilt reporting around the questions people were manually recreating, with the recurring cuts scheduled rather than requested.
BUSINESS OUTCOME
Ad-hoc report requests dropped and the reporting became the source people quoted in meetings instead of their own spreadsheets.
REFLECTION
Watch what users do outside your product. The workaround is the requirement.
SQL INVESTIGATION
SELECT account_id,
date_trunc('month', txn_ts) AS mth,
sum(amount) AS gross,
sum(tax) AS tax,
count(*) AS txns
FROM transactions
GROUP BY account_id, mth
ORDER BY mth DESC, gross DESC;