Analytics walkthrough

By using analytics, you'll know how to spot problems before they cost you money, make decisions based on facts rather than gut feel, and switch between high-level performance summaries and detailed reports to get exactly the level of information you need.

Let's make sure you know the key terms that underpin Analytics.

Your dashboard is where your business performance becomes visible. Instead of pulling data from reports, spreadsheets, and emails to get a picture of how things are going — you open one screen and the answer is already there. That's what a well-built dashboard does, and that's what we're building now.

The Marketplace is the fastest way to get meaningful data onto your dashboard. Building every widget from scratch takes time. The Marketplace gives you professionally configured widgets, built around the metrics field service businesses actually track! — ready to drop onto your dashboard and connected to your live data the moment you add them.

Access to edit or remove widgets depends on your permissions. If a dashboard has been shared with you on View and Edit access, you can make changes freely. If you're on View only, editing and deletion will be disabled. You now know how to find, add, and edit Marketplace widgets.

Every business has questions that a pre-built widget won't answer exactly right. Custom widgets let you define precisely what you're measuring, how it's calculated, and what time period it covers. Custom widgets are available on Customer Journey and Analytics+.

The metric is how your Job data gets calculated — the number that lands on the chart. Jobs give you five options; which you pick depends on the question you're asking. This short walks through all five.

Not every insight needs a chart. Sometimes the most powerful thing you can show is a single, prominent number — no axes, no legends, just the figures that matters most. Number Charts surface your most critical headline figures—those values that demand your attention the moment you open your dashboard. You would use one when a figure is important enough to stand alone, such as your total outstanding debt or current collection rate.

In this number chart, we are going to build a powerful feedback snapshot using three different metrics displayed in the same widget. First, we will look at the total number of responses received to establish a baseline for customer engagement across all departments. Next, we will add the count of negative responses so you can see at a glance how many customers expressed dissatisfaction. Finally, we will calculate the negative response percentage because raw numbers alone do not tell the full story. This allows Sarah to distinguish between a few isolated issues and a growing trend that might threaten your reputation.

With all three values side-by-side, you now have a complete, easy-to-read feedback snapshot that requires zero interpretation to understand and helps you spot issues early and track whether improvements are making a real difference. Keep your Number widgets focused, keep them few, and let the data do the work.

Widgets give you a quick overview. Tabular reports show the specific records — jobs, technicians, customers, invoices. This detail is essential if something needs attention on your dashboard.

Add from marketplace gives you access to Commusoft's library of pre-built reports that are ready to use straight away. Import brings in a shared report as a zip file with original settings. Don't rename the zip file before importing, as the filename is necessary. No need to extract it—upload the zip file directly.

​Building a report from scratch gives you complete control over what it shows and how it's organised. We'll look at the first six steps — naming, data source, columns, filters, totals, and grouping.

The last two steps are Value, which adds summary calculations to each group, and Conditional Formatting, which highlights important data. Then we'll save the report and see the results.

We've now completed all the steps for building a comprehensive tabular report

Building from scratch gives you full control, but there are two faster routes to a finished report — the Marketplace and Import.

Start with one dashboard and one report that answer the questions you need answered most. Get those right, then build from there. The more you use Analytics, the more clearly you'll see where your business is performing and where it needs attention.
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