The dashboard: your commerce overview

The dashboard is the first screen after sign-in, and it answers the back-office version of “how are we doing?” — what’s selling, what came in, and what needs someone’s attention today.

What you’re looking at

• Order activity — what reps and storefront buyers have submitted recently. This is your morning queue: new orders arrive here regardless of where they were written.
• Volume and trends — how the period is tracking, visualized. A spike, a slump, or a big single order all announce themselves here before anyone emails you about it.
• The health of the operation — because every channel (rep app, storefront) feeds the same platform, this one screen really is the whole business, not one slice of it.

Steps

1. Open the Dashboard (it’s also home — the logo takes you back).
2. Scan order activity first. Anything new since yesterday is your work queue; you’ll process orders in the Sales area, which is two lessons away.
3. Read the trend, not the number. Up, flat, or down versus the previous period matters more than the absolute figure — and it’s the thing worth mentioning in the Monday meeting.
4. Click through to anything that looks off. Dashboard elements link into the real records behind them — an odd number is always one click from its explanation.

Make it a habit

Open the dashboard first thing and after lunch. Thirty seconds each. You’re looking for two things: new orders to process, and anything that broke pattern. Everything else in this course is what you do about what you see here.