Are your Mondays crammed with filling out Excel sheets, building graphs, converting them into PDFs, and, finally, sending them off to each one of your clients, one by one?
What if you could automate your client reporting processes?
What if you could easily connect all your clients’ data, have them automatically refreshed every day, build reports on the updated data any time you wanted, and let your clients view their reports on a web page from wherever they are?
Sounds good, right? That is what ClicData does. Unlimited, beautiful, automated, up-to-date reports to your clients. Safely.
Here’s how.
Build Smart Dashboards
ClicData dashboards are chock full of features, and they’re all fast and easy to implement. Smart dashboards keep navigation seamless and intuitive, and smart features empower your agency to get more done, faster and more effectively.
While many people think they want to display endless KPIs in their reports, research shows that it’s best to limit the number of KPIs per report to ten for users to be able to consume the information most effectively. That means, for best results, you’ll want to build several dashboards to provide your users with all the metrics they need and want.
But that doesn’t mean your users have to awkwardly deal with numerous dashboards at the same time. ClicData gives you two ways to provide a smooth, intuitive, and easy transition to multiple dashboards.
1. Create links between dashboards
ClicData lets you create a “navigation bar”-like design, in which you can place a widget to open another dashboard. A very popular choice is, of course, the button widget, which can stand alone and be designed independently from any other button widget.
When you set it up, you simply enable the ‘Open dashboard’ interaction for when it’s clicked.
For example, your dashboard could look like this. The buttons at the top allow the user to open associated dashboards:
You can also pass dashboard parameters to pre-filter the next dashboard with the click of a button.
Learn more about this feature in our Help Center
Once your reporting suite is built, simply share the first page’s URL with your client and let them navigate through their own mini-website!
2. Create a binder
Binders are collections of dashboards that have a tabbed menu at the top. You can use binders to display another dashboard or a URL from another website. You are also given a few choices about how you want to design your tabs.
Using binders instead of buttons for navigation gives you more real estate to work with on your dashboard. You can even send your binders via email in a schedule, for example, or group all dashboards into a single multi-paged PDF.
Set user parameters
Customizing dashboards can typically demand a lot of time and effort. If you had three master dashboards, for example, and you wanted to customize them and share them with 20 different clients, you’d end up having to maintain 60 dashboards. It would take a tremendous amount of time to do that manually.
But with ClicData, you can simply build three master dashboards and set up user parameters to filter the data that displayed, customizing them to each user automatically. As a result, each of your clients will only see the data and the metrics that pertain to them—and no one else.
One dashboard to serve them all.
When you set up user parameters, such as company name, you can do so for each user or for a Team as a whole.
To set up your filters, include a column for company code in each row of your datasets. Then use that column to filter dashboard widgets based on the user parameter.
Users will either have to login to ClicData or the dashboard’s live link to access the dashboard. The system will identify the user and apply the correct filtering so they only see their own data.
If you want to send dashboards via email, the system will generate them with the supplied user parameters, and the user receives their correctly-filtered dashboard.
Learn how to set up user parameters
Custom Access Rights and Security
Now that your dashboards are ready, you can assign your users access rights depending upon how much permission you want to give them to modify or edit data.
User licences
Any time you create a new user in ClicData, you’ll assign them the access level, or licence type, you want to give them.
- Admins can see and edit everything. Period.
- Editors can view and edit what they’ve been given access to.
- Viewers can only view what they’ve been given access to.
You’ll give your clients either Editor or Viewer licenses, for example.
User and Team security
You can set security levels for each of your Level 1 folders (under the main Team Folder) and/or at the item level per data and dashboards.
In the example below, the Level 1 folders would be ‘Company A’ or ‘Company B’:
If you want an editor to be able to access a dataset or a dashboard, add them to the folder’s security list as well as the item’s security list. This way you can fine-tune who can access and edit which item.
Typically, people like to set up one folder per client and assign the client’s licenses to the folder’s security list.
White Label
Make ClicData your own! With our set of white label features, you can easily turn your ClicData account into your branded BI solution. You’ll find them under your Account settings.
It only takes a few steps. First, add your name and logo to the platform.
Second, customize your login screen with your branded background, custom logo, company name, and color palette.
Third, change the domain name of your ClicData account, using any domain name that’s hosted with a website domain hosting service.
Last, define the email that you want to use to send dashboard, binders, data, etc.
Learn more about ClicData’s white label features here.
Easy Client Access to Dashboards
Use live links
Interactive dashboards are meant to be used in a web environment, but you can also create live links to your dashboards, while keeping them private with the help of your user parameters. Through a live link, your clients can log into their dashboards on a webpage and get full interactivity—within the access rights you’ve given them in their user parameters.
ClicData also lets you embed live links of webpages into other applications, providing even more accessibility without forfeiting security.
Learn how to embed your dashboards into your application and create a seamless user experience for your clients by auto-logging them in.
Send dashboards as PDFs
Sometimes clients prefer to get printed versions of reports or they simply want to get a quick snapshot of their KPIs at a particular time. With ClicData, that, too, is easy to do.
When you schedule and automate sending customized dashboards to your clients, you can specify exactly when—and how—your client receives them. You’ll indicate the frequency, day, time, and/or interval of time to send them as well as the format they prefer to receive it—including PDF, Image, Powerpoint or live link. A popular time is Monday morning before they even arrive in their offices!
However, if you have more than one document of your dashboard, it’s a good idea to merge them together. Not only will this cut down on the number of files you send, but it can also help your clients stay organized. For example, you can start merging PDFs using a free PDF writer tool like PDFSimpli.
Final Note
If you’ve followed these steps, you’ve set up a fully-automated, secure, and up-to-date dashboard generation and reporting process that fits to your clients and saves you a tremendous amount of time and effort.
Now, what are you going to do with all that time you’ve freed up?
Give ClicData a try with your own data
Connect all your data, blend it together and publish interactive, fully automated dashboards to your team or clients.
All of it by EOD.
