Reporting with dashboards

Asana's dashboards can help teams track progress, visualize data, and make informed decisions. This article will explore how to create dashboards and leverage custom fields for insightful reporting. 

What's a dashboard in Asana?

A dashboard is a visual representation of your project data. Dashboards are made up of different types of charts and serve as a dynamic, real-time overview of tasks, projects, and portfolios, offering insights to keep your team aligned and initiatives on track.

The charts in dashboards will auto-populate when you first land on the tab, but you can add, remove, or customize them as needed. Dashboards automatically update every time you visit the tab or refresh the page, ensuring the information is up-to-date and accurate. 

When to use different dashboards

Determining the correct type of dashboard depends on your audience and reporting needs. 

• Project dashboards show charts created from data from a specific project. Ideal for team members focused on specific tasks or projects, providing a detailed view of progress, deadlines, and task dependencies.
• Portfolio dashboards show charts created from data from the projects housed in the portfolio. They are helpful for those overseeing multiple projects. This high-level overview includes key metrics, timelines, and resource allocation.
• Universal dashboards comprise a combination of charts that can pull data from tasks, projects, portfolios, and goals. Universal dashboards are tailored for executives and stakeholders who need a consolidated view of various projects and portfolios, aiding strategic decision-making.

Creating a project dashboard

To create new charts in your project dashboard, navigate to the desired project, click the Dashboard tab, and click + Add chart. 

Customize your dashboard to report on task-level insights such as the number of completed tasks, overdue tasks, or progress status. 

Building a portfolio dashboard

Portfolio dashboards are prefiltered to include only data from your selected portfolio, including tasks and data from nested portfolios. Nested portfolios are portfolios within portfolios.

To create new charts in your portfolio dashboard, navigate to the Dashboard tab in your portfolio and click + Add chart. 

Portfolio dashboards show you task-level and project-level insights, like how many projects are on track or at risk or how many projects are per team.

Creating a universal dashboard

To create a universal reporting dashboard: 

1. Navigate to the sidebar and click Reporting
2. Click +Create
3. Select Dashboard 

You can manage existing dashboards, customize visuals, and create new ones from here.

You can create charts using preset options or create your custom chart. When creating custom charts, you can report on tasks, projects, portfolios, and goals and choose to include tasks from your entire organization or specific teams, portfolios, projects, and project owners.

Learn more about the different types of charts you can create with universal reporting.

Custom fields and reporting

Custom fields are the backbone of meaningful reporting in Asana. With custom fields, you can categorize and classify your work. For example, you can create “Priority” and “Status” fields and use these custom fields as data points to build dashboards to see which high-priority projects are off track. 

When creating projects, you need to be thoughtful about what types of things could be helpful as custom fields, as these custom fields will then power your dashboards. You can create global custom fields and add them to your organization’s library to use them across your projects.

Learn how to create and use custom fields.

Sharing dashboards

Share your dashboards effortlessly with team members and stakeholders.

Project and Portfolio dashboards

Project and portfolio owners can make a project or portfolio private or public. Making it private will mean that only members can access the content within, and it won't be discoverable. 

To share your portfolio dashboards, click the Share button at the top-right corner from within the portfolio. 

Universal dashboards

By default, all dashboards are private to the owner of the dashboard. To share a universal dashboard, click the Share button within the dashboard. From here, you can add members to the dashboard or copy a shareable link.