What is a weekly dashboard?
A weekly dashboard is an interface tool that consolidates data from multiple sources (e.g., project management tools, CRM systems, financial software) to track and display key performance indicators (KPIs) (e.g., task completion rate, sales growth, budget variance), enabling teams and organizations to monitor weekly performance and create presentations for stakeholders and executives.
Weekly dashboards are typically built using flexible tools like Google Looker Studio, Power BI, Google Sheets, or platform-specific solutions to enable high customization and integration of multiple data sources.
What to include in a weekly dashboard?
An actionable weekly dashboard balances context and specificity based on the audience (executives, managers, and analysts) and their use cases.
Executive weekly dashboards
Executive dashboards for CEOs, CFOs, and stakeholders show the organization's bottom-line impact. Reviewed weekly, they include:
- Financial performance analysis: revenue, expenses, and profit margins.
- Operational efficiency analysis: productivity metrics, resource utilization.
- Customer satisfaction analysis: feedback scores, retention rates.
- Add text for additional context to translate metrics for non-technical audiences. Present in slide decks and simplified Looker Studio reports.
Manager weekly dashboards
Manager dashboards have cross-departmental views with drill-downs to see performance by team, project, region, and objective. They help align teams, define tactics, and include:
- Project tracking: overall progress, milestones, and deadlines.
- Goal tracking: compare current performance vs objectives.
- Audits for prioritization and spotting issues
- Resource allocation for optimizing team efforts.
- Employee performance and engagement metrics.
Operational Weekly Dashboards
Operational dashboards for analysts and team leads have granular, customizable KPIs to solve technical issues. Monitored hourly, daily, or weekly, they cover:
- Task management: completion rates, overdue tasks, bottlenecks.
- Sales: lead conversion rates, sales pipeline status.
- Customer support: ticket resolution times, satisfaction scores.
- Inventory: stock levels, turnover rates, order fulfillment.
Operational weekly dashboards are highly customized, built in flexible tools like Google Sheets or Looker Studio to enable data cleaning, blending, annotations, and integrating multiple sources.
How to build a weekly dashboard?
To build a weekly dashboard, connect your data sources, choose a template on Looker Studio or Sheets, build your queries by selecting metrics and dimensions, choose charts to visualize your data, customize the dashboard, design and share via link, PDF or email.
Here’s the breakdown:
Connect data sources
Define and connect the data sources to bring to your dashboard. Common sources are project management tools for task tracking, CRM systems for sales data, financial software for budget tracking, and customer feedback platforms for satisfaction scores.
To connect your data sources, go to portermetrics.com, choose the data sources to bring to your dashboard.
You can follow these tutorials on connecting your data:
Choose a template
Choose from dozens of weekly dashboard templates in Google Sheets or Looker Studio, designed for use cases like project tracking, sales monitoring, budget analysis, and team performance.
Learn to copy Looker Studio templates.
While templates are the starting point. Make them specific for your business or organization. Map your specific metrics, especially custom KPIs, CRM contact data, project milestones, and all the fields and metrics that you define as "key performance indicators" and "objectives".
Depending on your reporting tool—Google Sheets or Google Looker Studio, pick any of the dozens of templates created by our team and customers to solve your weekly reporting use cases, such as project tracking, sales monitoring, budget analysis, and team performance.
Select metrics, dimensions, and charts
Once your dashboard template is downloaded, you may 1)modify it or 2) create a blank page to build it from scratch. Whatever the case, setting up a query always follows these steps:
- Select the data source and the account connected to it
- Choose metrics (e.g., Task completion rate, sales growth, budget variance, etc.).
- Choose breakdowns to segment your data (e.g., by date, project name, team member, etc.)
You can follow these tutorials on adding data to your dashboards
Design
To make your weekly dashboards truly white-label you can add logos, colors, fonts, and styling to mirror your brand.
Follow these tutorials to design your weekly dashboards:
Share
Share your weekly dashboards via links, PDF, schedule emails, and control permissions.
KPIs to include in a weekly dashboard?
Weekly dashboards should include a mix of operational, financial, customer, and team performance metrics and KPIs to fully understand the performance of the organization towards business goals. They include:
Operational KPIs measure the efficiency and effectiveness of processes:
- Task metrics: completion rate, overdue tasks, bottlenecks
- Sales metrics: lead conversion rates, sales growth, pipeline status
- Customer metrics: satisfaction scores, retention rates, feedback
Financial KPIs compare your financial outputs to the cost, including:
- Revenue: total sales, growth rate
- Expenses: budget variance, cost control
- Profitability: profit margins, ROI
Team performance KPIs compare the input with the output from one stage to another
- Productivity: tasks completed per team member
- Engagement: employee satisfaction, turnover rates
- Collaboration: cross-departmental projects, communication effectiveness
To analyze these weekly KPIs, segment them by:
- Department: sales, marketing, operations, finance
- Time: Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly
- Project: milestones, objectives
- Team: members, roles, responsibilities
- Customer: feedback, demographics, behavior
