Dashboard

The shape of your business in one screen. This page is about which number to act on, because most of them are just interesting.

Where the Dashboard is

The Dashboard is not the page you land on. That is Today. Find the Dashboard in the left side under More in Today, or in All pages in the Menu. For the five places, the Menu, Quick Find and Settings, see Getting around.

The numbers

Leads. How many came in. Rising means your marketing works. It says nothing about whether you are making money.

Calls. How many were placed or answered. A volume number, not a quality one.

Connect rate. Of the calls placed, how many reached a human. This is the first number that tells you something real.

Bookings. Appointments made. This is the one that turns into money.

Booking rate. Of the conversations you had, how many booked. This is the number to watch. Everything else is upstream of it.

Leads gone quiet. Leads you are working (contacted, quoted or hot) with no call or text in three days or more; a lead nobody has dialed counts from its last stage change. It is the same definition Ideas uses when Mani offers to re-open them and Today uses for its list, counted in full, so the three never show two different counts. The line under it says how long the quietest has been quiet, for example "the longest for 4 months", counted from a date that is never earlier than the day the lead was added. Today and Ideas work at most a dozen at a time and say so: "The 12 most pressing of 16 quiet leads."

Your money, and its window. Each money figure names the window it covers, because they do not all follow the window you pick. First-year commission and Persistency are all time (your whole book), In flight is now (applications not paying yet), and Won, Paid commission and Policies bound follow the window you picked. Won counts paying policies; on All time that is every paying policy in your book, the same count Performance shows. Policies bound counts every policy with a bound date in the window, whatever its status. Performance's carrier table counts every policy in your book, bound or not, so its total can be higher.

A figure with nothing in it yet says so in a small line under its label (for example "No calls in this window"), never in the big number's place.

Minutes used

Minutes used is the count your plan bills on: each call rounded up to the whole minute, calls that never connected left out, over the calendar month. It is the same number on the Dashboard, in Settings, and on the monthly recap.

The monthly recap also shows Time on the phone, the talking itself. It is a different number: it is not rounded up per call, and it counts every call in your own month, including calls you place from the dialer, which are billed on their own and never against your plan's minutes. Two numbers, two names, never one number under two names.

Reading it

Ask two questions in order.

Are people answering? If the connect rate is low, nothing downstream matters. The cause is the list or the timing, not your front desk. See Calls and outcomes.

Are conversations booking? If the connect rate is fine and the booking rate is low, you had the conversations and lost them. Check Availability first (the usual cause is that there was genuinely nothing to offer) then what your front desk knows.

That order matters. People retrain their front desk for a week when the actual problem was a four-hour minimum notice.

What is worth reacting to

Trends, not days. One bad day is weather. Two bad weeks is a change.

Compare like to like. Last month against this month, not this Tuesday against last Friday.

A month is the honest window for anything about conversion. A week is enough to notice something broke.

Note: If your dashboard only shows a short window and you want a longer view, ask a connected assistant. get_call_metrics takes any lookback you want: "Compare my last ninety days to the ninety before."

Numbers that mislead

Total calls. Easy to inflate, tells you nothing. A thousand calls with a four percent connect rate is worse than two hundred with forty.

Leads, alone. More leads from a worse source is a downgrade you will read as growth.

A single day. Someone was sick, a holiday, one big job. Ignore it.

When it looks wrong

Everything is zero. Nothing is running. Check speed to lead is on and leads are actually arriving in Leads.

Leads but no calls. Automation is off, or it is outside your calling hours (9am to 7pm by default, Monday to Saturday).

Calls but no bookings. Availability, nearly always.

More in Troubleshooting.