Custom Dashboards
Custom Dashboards is the innovative tool from Lawmatics built for measuring your firm’s unique performance metrics. For anyone who has had the experience of engineering multiple spreadsheets with complex formulas for data tracking, this feature is for you.
**Note: This feature is available for users on the Team pricing tier and above.
With your choice of graphs and charts, Custom Dashboards display relevant and easily digestible data. Fully customize the layouts, as well as staff permissions, of your dashboards with a selection of panel types to keep members of your team productive and on course. Whether you use it for marketing data, financial health, staff metrics, or anything else, Custom Dashboards will transform your data into a driver of your firm’s growth and success.
To get started, click on the Lawmatics logo in the top left corner to access your dashboard. Here you will see your standard built-in firm dashboard, which will look similar to the example shown below.
Click the arrow, highlighted in red above, to create a new dashboard. Once you have created your dashboard, you will then click on Create Panel near the top right corner to begin building the dashboard. We'll walk through the steps of building your dashboard in this article, with the goal of creating an easy-to-view, all-encompassing custom dashboard such as the sample shown below.
Types of Panels
Text - This will appear as simple text when added to your dashboard. Use this for an inspirational quote, team memo, or other simple text note. Edit your text as shown below.
Once added to the dashboard, drag and drop this panel to wherever you would like it placed. It will appear as shown below.
Section Header - Use this panel to label various sections of your dashboard, as shown in the example below with the heading, Marketing Data.
Data Panel - This is the most robust panel type. You'll use this panel to pull data from your CRM such as tasks, appointments, custom report data, matter metrics, and more. We'll dive deeper into this below.
Group - This panel type allows you to link multiple other panels together. When adding a group panel, you will be prompted to select which of your already existing panels should be added to the group:
Once two (or more) panels have been grouped, you'll be able to drag and drop them around the dashboard as one single unit, as shown below.
Layout and Organization
As you add panels to your custom dashboard, feel free to drag and drop each panel around the grid as desired.
You can also drag the bottom right corner of any panel to adjust its size, having it take up as many cells on the grid as you would like.
Use the section header and text panels to help organize your dashboard.
Note that you can create as many custom dashboards as you would like. You may choose to have one big dashboard with various section headings, or perhaps you create multiple dashboards with each containing fewer panels. Feel free to use your creativity and set up your dashboard(s) however you would like.
After you are finished editing your dashboard, make sure to click the Save button at the top to save your work.
Creating a Data Panel
As previously stated, this is the most robust type of panel in your custom dashboards. When creating a data panel you will see the following options for data type:
Use E-Signatures, Appointments, Tasks, Time Entries, and Invoices to pull those metrics from your system. You will find various options for these such as date range selections and data type.
When you select Matters as the Data Type, you will find the most options and customizations. First, you'll see some standard metrics. These are similar to some of the calculations found on your firm's Analytics page. These are a great way to quickly get started with new panels on your custom dashboard.
In addition to these standard metrics, you can also pull any custom report data into a dashboard panel. Custom reports are a huge part of creating your all-encompassing custom dashboard, because they allow you to view any custom field data in an easy-to-digest format right on your dashboard.
For example, you may wish to have a panel that shows the allocation distribution of your firm's various marketing sources. Begin by creating a simple report, similar to the one shown below:
Note how Source and Practice area are the only additional columns in this report besides the matter's name.
Now when creating your data panel, you will simply select the report, select a specific date range if you would like, choose how to display the report (pie chart, bar graph, etc), and then select which column from the report should be used for the grouping.
If you recall, I have both "source" and "practice area" as columns in my report, so both of these will show up as options in the Grouping selection. Only one can be selected at a time, so make sure to select the column that will show the data you wish to view with this panel. Since I am trying to create a Source distribution panel, I have chosen Source as the grouping and Pie Chart as the display. This panel will appear as so (note, you may need to drag the bottom right corner to enlarge the panel once it is first added to your dashboard):
Remember that pie chart is merely one of the options for how to view your data. The other options are as follows:
Value- view either a count of total matches on the custom report, or a sum or average of a column of your choosing on the report.
Bar Chart- view a bar chart of the field of your choosing.
Gauge- set a custom amount to be used as the goal, the panel will then show you your progress toward that goal.
Staff Permissions
By default, your firm's Admin users will have access to view, create, and edit custom dashboards. All other users will not be granted that permission. You are welcome to make edits to this at any time by navigating to settings > user management > manage roles.
Any users who have access to the permission highlighted above will be able to view/edit all of the firm's dashboards. In other words, the dashboards are not created on an individual user basis, but rather they are firm-wide.