💡 Universal Reporting: how to mix Asana data and external data

[Bastien_Siebman]

With the newest Universal Reporting, the need to include external data quickly came into the picture for me. But at the moment, dashboards only show data from actual projects. So I found a workaround

The goal of this example is to have a dashboard with sales (from Asana data) as well as Pipedrive lead number and weighted volume. Here’s the final result:

The third graph is just a bar chart made from a Revenue project that contains invoices. The trick lies within the two other charts: their source is a stand-alone project, created only with the purpose of holding external data:

That might seems a little weird, but that works! This special project could be manually updated by someone on a regular basis, or you can some automation filling in those values that’s what I’ll do myself

Then the chart settings look like this:

Anyone finds this useful? Let me know!

Bonus point from @LEGGO : tke “Pipedrive KPIs” project could actually be a shared project with various KPIs, and a dropdown with dashboards to filter on kpis to use.

Version française

[Bastien_Siebman]

@LEGGO you might like this one!

[LEGGO]

@Bastien_Siebman I do love the creativity here. I absolutely think I’ll do something similar in some instances. Perhaps bring in a few external data points to help complete the picture in an Asana dashboard.

That said, there is far too much data outside of Asana that we report against. While the universal reporting is an excellent new feature, it does have its limitations to how and what you show. For that reason, I probably won’t be trying to fit external data into this box.

For the data I do bring in… I think having a dedicated project for this is perfect. I would even suggest having a global field with dropdowns that match the dashboards the data will link to. This way you can use those fields to filter to the necessary data yet still contain all the external points in one project.

[George.C]

A filter should be available to exclude projects from reports, like search has.

And also have the option of using a reporting dashboard as your home.

[Bastien_Siebman]

@George.C

A filter should be available to exclude projects from reports, like search has.

The Universal Reporting allows you to cherry pick, but you would want to say “Projects from portfolio A but not project X”?

@George.C

And also have the option of using a reporting dashboard as your home.

If you are using Chrome, you can bookmark the dashboard as “Asana” and voilà

[George.C]

Hey @Bastien_Siebman

I am looking basically for the option “Not in these projects” like the one found in “Custom search”. The reason why is because i am using various “hacks” to overcome some missing features: for example for staff leaves i have a project called “Team Leaves” and another “Public Holidays”. I don’t want those projects to come up in the reports.

I know i can do it through bookmarking, however adding it through settings as an option would be more professional; set as “Default Home Page” option.

[Meg_Epstein]

Can something like this be used to track KPI’s in Asana and attach them to goals?

[Bastien_Siebman]

What do you mean by “attach to goals”?