I could use some clarification or correction on my understanding of the Comparison Metric Widget, and how to best track and plot KPI metrics on a Dashboard.
1) With the Comparison Metric widget, is SmartSuite somehow tracking changes in values over time behind the scenes, or is it just looking at one specific date field of your choice and grabbing records in the requested time frame with respect to that date? e.g. if you choose "KPI Date" and rolling window 30 days, it would report the sum of every metric value with KPI Date within the last 30 days, and compare it to the sum of metric values where KPI Date was 31-60 days old?
2) Is there any trick to getting the cool bar display of metric values over time that I see in the screenshots when this widget was announced? I only get the current value and +/- x%, no mini-graph.
3) What I'm really looking to do is to track a half-dozen KPIs on a monthly basis, visualize the trends over time, and easily see how they compare to last month or since the start of the fiscal year. My thought it to add a new record for each KPI every month, and the fields be the metric name, metric value, metric date, target value, and use status of Current or Prior. Then in the dashboard:
- I could use a grid view with filter status=current to show the current values, or
- Use the comparison metric widget to show the current value and +/-% from prior
- Use a bar graph to show metric value vs target value
- Use a line graph to show each metric's trend over time
Does that sound like a good approach for a KPI app and dashboard, or are there better approaches for how SmartSuite does things? The alternative would be to have just a single row per reporting period and have one field for each metric I want to track. This would have a major advantage of being able to use a FORM to enter the values all at once, and it would greatly reduce the number of records in the app.
Thanks in advance!