Chart your course to success with Dynamics 365: Charts and Dashboards

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Charts and Dashboards are one of the most powerful features in Microsoft’s CRM solution. They allow you to see a 360degree view of your business and efficiently display data that allows you to understand key performance metrics in real-time. By better understanding how you are performing, you can make immediate changes to any aspects of your business that is struggling, or double-down on areas that are proving to be successful.

Here’s how they work:

A chart is a visual representation of filtered data, or a view. A dashboard is a collection of charts, giving users a real time snapshot of the key performance indicators they want to track. Much like a dashboard in a car, it provides information on what’s going on with various functions at that precise moment.

Properly configured, Dynamics 365 Charts and Dashboards can be your organization’s go-to place for business intelligence. Charts and dashboards draw from all your businesses data sources and aren’t limited toD365 proper. You can connect to numerous other databases (ERP, accounting system, etc.) to bring in data from these diverse sources, to create a truly complete view of all key metrics.

 Below is an image of a typical Sales Activity Dashboard in Dynamics 365. Dashboards are by no means limited to sales activities: users can track any data that is important to their organization. This particular dashboard is comprised of five charts. Notice the variety of ways data can bed is played, including funnel, pie graph, bar graph and stack bar graph. Each chart can be customized to display data in the way individual users prefer.

Dynamics 365 Charts and Dashboards gives users powerful “drill down” capabilities with charts and dashboards. In the example below, one click on the Sales Pipeline funnel chart opens a window which shows all the data that it’s comprised of. Users are free to keep drilling down to more and more granular levels:

Now, one more click, this time on the “Nurture” section of the funnel, reveals all the Sales Opportunities currently in the Develop stage:

From here, if a user wishes to review the individual Opportunities which comprise the Nurture stage, they can click on any of the blue links to open the Opportunity:

Now the actual Opportunity record opens:

With just a few clicks, users can easily navigate from very high-level dashboard views to a very detailed look into the data.   

You can learn how to use Dashboards and Charts, along with many other components of Dynamics 365 on our YouTube channel, or at our Learning Academy. Subscribe and sign-up for free now and stay up to date on all the latest Microsoft Dynamics 365 developments.