In an era where data is considered the new gold, the ability to use information effectively is becoming a decisive competitive advantage. From version 16, Odoo offers a wide range of options for data evaluation, enabling companies not only to gain an overview of complex data volumes, but also to tailor evaluations to their individual needs.
The role of data in today's business world
The modern business world is increasingly characterized by the ability not only to collect data, but also to access it in real time in order to make quick and agile decisions. Dashboards serve as an interface to visualize complex data sets and gain interpretable insights, taking the importance of data in the business world to a new level.
No two companies are the same, which means that the requirements for data analysis also vary. Standardized analyses are often unable to capture all the nuances. Against this background, a series of predefined analyses are already provided as standard as part of the Dashboards module from Odoo 16 onwards. These are over 20 evaluations from the areas of sales, subscriptions, CRM, accounting, logistics, marketing, website and HR.
In this blog article, we take a closer look at the custom creation of dashboards so that you can develop your own dashboards in addition to these ready-made evaluations and thus use the module to its full extent. To do this, we will put ourselves in the shoes of the managing director of a medium-sized company to understand, using a practical example, how dashboards help companies to transform their data into valuable insights.
Odoo 17 Dashboards - A practical example
The focus of our dashboard should be on customer relationships and, to be more precise, on the individual sales employees. With this in mind, we define the goals we want to achieve with our dashboard in advance:
Goal setting
- Number of sales opportunities per sales employee
- Expected sales per sales employee
- Dynamic ranking of the three best sales employees
Creation of the dashboard
To create the dashboards, the "Documents" module is required in addition to the "Dashboards" module, as the so-called Spreadsheets are located in this module and can be compared with Excel tables. The first step in creating the dashboard is therefore to create an empty spreadsheet from the "Documents" module, which forms the basis of our dashboard.
In the upper area of the new spreadsheet, the name can be customized directly - in this example we call it "Sales analysis". To fill the spreadsheet with the relevant information from Odoo, we go to the "CRM" module, where we display the sales grouped according to the sales employee and the current phase of the sales contract as a graph. We can then use the "Insert into spreadsheet" button to insert the graph into the spreadsheet we have created.
In the spreadsheet, we can then customize the chart as desired using the menu in the top right-hand corner of the chart. In our case, we change the name of the chart and place the legend at the bottom.
This diagram already gives us a good overview of the number of sales opportunities of the individual sales employees. What we do not see, however, is the amount of expected sales and a clear ranking of the current best salespeople. To generate the relevant data, we return to the CRM module and this time use the pivot view instead of the chart view. Pivot views are very versatile in dashboards because, unlike charts, they can be edited more extensively in the spreadsheet and can also be enriched with additional data.
In our example, we need a view of the expected sales per employee and therefore select "Expected sales" as the value and add the individual sales employees to the rows of the view using the plus symbol. We then sort the expected sales in descending order using the arrow next to the column name.
As before, we insert the view into our existing spreadsheet and see that another spreadsheet is created for each additional data import. At this point, it is important to mention that in the final dashboard, only the first page of the spreadsheet is displayed in the dashboard and therefore all relevant information must be placed on the first page. As the ranking of sales employees is a central objective of the dashboard, the pivot view that has just been inserted from the "Sheet1" spreadsheet should be selected, copied and pasted into the first page.
By clicking on a value in the pivot view, you can see that Odoo does not just insert the values from the created pivot view into the spreadsheet without formatting, but that each cell accesses the respective value of the original view. In our case, the selected value is the name of the employee with the user ID 2. This Odoo procedure allows you to customize inserted pivot views to your own needs.
In accordance with the defined objective, we do not want to see all sales employees in the ranking, but only the current top three. To achieve this, we place a hash sign in front of the element to be searched for in the first row in both the left and right columns in order to search for a number rather than a specific ID. This number is 1, as we are defining the employee at the top of our ranking. We therefore change the two formulas as follows:
"Sales employee" column:
=ODOO.PIVOT.HEADER(1,"user_id",2) → =ODOO.PIVOT.HEADER(1,"#user_id",1)
"Expected turnover" column:
=ODOO.PIVOT(1,"expected_revenue","user_id",2) → =ODOO.PIVOT(1,"expected_revenue","#user_id",1)
Once the changes to the formulas for the employee in the first position have been implemented, we select the entire row and drag the formula to the third position so that the formula is adopted for the second and third rows. The table is now configured so that only the best three sales employees are displayed according to the expected turnover. In our case, the row of the fourth employee can then be removed and with a few formatting changes to the cells and their margins, our spreadsheet looks like this.
Now that we have fulfilled all the dashboard objectives set at the beginning, we can transfer the spreadsheet to a new dashboard via the "File" tab and "Add to dashboard". At this point, we select the name of the dashboard to be created and place the dashboard in a suitable dashboard group. The access rights for the dashboard can also be set here.
We now leave the Documents module and go to the Dashboards module, where we are greeted on the left-hand side by the standard dashboards mentioned at the beginning. Our dashboard created in this blog post can now be opened in the "CRM" area.
If you also need a dashboard in Odoo tailored to your needs, feel free to contact us! We also offer the development of evaluations and dashboards using Microsoft PowerBI in order to combine more complex data from more than one source for you.
Sources: www.odoo.com