Dashboard
The screen that greets a user after signing in: a set of tiles with numbers that show at a glance where work has piled up. A tile is not a report but one question with one answer — "how many unapproved shipments", "how far overdue are receivables", "how many service orders are ready for handover". Clicking a tile opens the journal with the filter already applied — the very filter the number was counted by — or the report where the number is broken down in detail.
The dashboard is turned on for each user separately: their card has a "Dashboard" checkbox. While it is unchecked, the screen does not appear at all. In a new SaaS company the checkbox is already ticked for the owner (user SA), who sees the starter tiles from the first sign-in; for other users the administrator ticks it.
A worked example
A storekeeper opens the system in the morning. The dashboard shows the five tiles of the starting set: their invoices for the month, their unapproved invoices, the overdue amount on them, the documents of their location for the month, and their cash shift. The "My unapproved invoices" tile shows 3, so three invoices were left unapproved yesterday. A click opens the invoice journal already filtered by that user and by "not approved": those three documents and nothing else.
A tile with a zero and a tile with a number look different on purpose: zero means "all clear here", and it should not pull attention.
Choosing what to show
The settings button on the dashboard itself ("Configure dashboard") opens the list of all catalogue tiles — 30 of them today. Tick the ones you need, press "Save", and the set is remembered for you. Your neighbour will have their own. The same button closes the list if you changed nothing; if you did, the list stays open and the choice is yours: "Save" or "Cancel".
If the chosen tiles don't fit on the screen, the dashboard itself scrolls. The settings button sits at the start of the first row, so after scrolling down it comes back into view when you return to the top.
The starting five are only a beginning: the other twenty-five are off by default and will not appear on their own, only when you tick them. That is deliberate — a dashboard where everything arrives by itself turns into a wall of numbers that people stop reading within a week.
Tiles that need a binding in your card
Two tiles count "yours" rather than "everything": "Documents at my location this month" takes the location from your card, and "My cash shift" takes the cashier flag. With neither in the card there is nothing to count.
Such a tile does not disappear from the selection list — you can still tick it, and then it appears on the dashboard with a dash and the explanation "No binding for this tile in your card". This is deliberate: an empty space where you placed a tile yourself reads as a breakage, while a dash with an explanation reads as a task for the administrator. In the settings list itself such a tile is marked "no binding in your card".
The other twenty-eight tiles need no binding — they count across the whole company.
What tiles exist
Personal (the starting set): my invoices this month · my unapproved invoices · overdue on my invoices · documents at my location this month · my cash shift.
Stock — what is left unapproved: shipments · goods receipts · returns from customers · returns to suppliers · stock transfers · write-offs · stocktakes.
Sales, purchasing and money: customer invoices not shipped · purchase orders not received · overdue receivables · overdue payables · money on accounts · cash forecast.
Stock levels: stock shortages.
Production: production planned · production not finished · produced today · raw material deficit.
The production tiles count "Production" documents, not production orders. "Production planned" means productions in the "Created" status that have not been started yet. An order from which no production has been created yet does not show up here. "Produced today" is the quantity of the productions finished today, shown as a quantity rather than an amount. Disassemblies are subtracted from it, as in Production statistics.
Service: new orders · ready for handover · returned for rework · past due date · on-site · taken in today · completed today.
Tiles that open a report
Six tiles open a report instead of a journal. The two overdue-debt tiles open the "Client Aging Report" and the "Vendor Aging Report": the report shows all the debt split by terms, while the tile shows only its overdue part (invoices whose payment term ended before today). The other four are worth knowing closer:
- Money on accounts — today's balance of the payment-mode accounts (cash desk, bank, card) in the base currency; clicking opens "Cash Book by Operation Records" with the period from the 1st of the current month to today, so after "Run" the balance in the line "Turnover and cash register balance at the end of the period" equals the number on the tile (the general reporting period for other openings of the book does not change). The tile takes all entries of the account, as the Nominal Ledger Report does; if some entries belong to no cash register (no cash register object, or another currency), the book shows them in the lines "Account entries outside cash registers at the beginning of the period" and "Account entries outside cash registers at the end of the period", and then the number on the tile equals the line "Total for the accounts at the end of the period". Only an account of type "Asset" counts: a payment mode may also be tied to a liability, equity or expense account (bonuses, offsets, write-offs) — the book shows it as a line, but the tile leaves it out, because that is not money. Under the number — how many accounts; if one of them is negative (more paid out than came in), the tile turns red and says how many.
- Cash forecast — whether there will be enough money four weeks ahead: "money on accounts" plus unpaid customer invoices, minus unpaid vendor invoices, plus or minus planned payments, day by day. No gap — the tile's number is the balance at the end of the fourth week, with the date and the lowest balance over that time below it. A gap ahead — the tile is red, the number is the lowest balance, and below it "cash gap from …". No payment mode has an account — the tile shows "—" and "unknown: payment modes have no accounts": there is then no way to know how much money there is now, and the forecast would start from zero. Clicking opens the Payment calendar already run for the same period, without the parameters window: the report's summary and the tile are counted by one function.
- Stock shortages — how many items have free stock (stock minus reservations) below the "Min. qty" in the item card; an item with no stock at all is short too. Clicking opens the "Stock Shortages Report". Under the number — how many items have a min. qty at all; if none, "No min. qty set".
- Raw material deficit — how many components are short for created and started productions: each production's need from its rows, minus what operations have already consumed, is added up across all productions and compared with free stock. Purchase orders are not counted. Neither are production orders: their need is shown by the Deficit in production orders report. Clicking opens "Deficit in production" (the "Normal" view); under the number — how many productions are open. The report compares stock with the need of each group of productions sharing the same set of components separately, so a component shared by different recipes can be short on the tile while no group of the report shows it.
Typical situations
There is no dashboard at all. The "Dashboard" checkbox in the user's card is unticked; the administrator sets it.
A tile shows a dash instead of a number. It is a tile with a binding, and the card has none: no location is set, or the cashier flag is missing. The number appears as soon as the administrator fills the card in.
There is a number, but the journal opens empty. The documents behind the count are not visible to you under your permissions: the tile counts over the data, while the journal shows what you are allowed to see.
You want another tile and it is not in the list. The tile catalogue is defined in the system's code; a developer adds a new one. Say which question you want to see as a number — that is the task statement.