How many estimated hours of work does your team have booked this month? How many tasks are currently overdue? How much are you sitting on in unpaid invoices? Most businesses answer questions like these by opening a spreadsheet, or by asking someone to go and find out.
With an Asana dashboard you answer them in a few seconds. Bosses, managers and team leaders all love a good dashboard, and Asana's reporting means you can keep yours up to date in real time and share key insights across the business without rebuilding anything.
The data is almost certainly already in your Asana account. This is how to get it out.
The two places you can build a dashboard
The first thing to understand is that there are two places you can set up a dashboard in Asana, and where you build it is determined by what you're actually trying to report on. Get this wrong and you'll hit a wall on what's available to you.
The first place is inside an individual project. The second is at the universal, account-wide level, under the Strategy tab. They look similar and they're built the same way, but what they can see is very different.
Project dashboards: reporting on one project
Take an invoices project as an example. It has sections for supplier and contractor invoices, a task for each individual invoice, the due date used to show when it needs to be paid, and a custom field holding the invoice amount. Ordinary project setup, nothing exotic.
At the top of that project there's a Dashboard tab. If you're not seeing it, click the plus button and create one. The dashboard there pulls data and information from the tasks in that specific project, and only from that project.
That makes project level reporting the right choice for the status or health of tasks in one place, or for pulling information out of custom fields on those tasks. It's narrow by design, and the narrowness is the point when the question you're answering is about one piece of work.
Universal dashboards under the Strategy tab
The second place is the Reporting section under the Strategy tab. This is where you create universal dashboards that look at tasks and projects throughout the entire account, which makes it a far more holistic reporting tool.
This is the one for managers, business owners and team leaders who want to see the big picture, and for anyone who needs to compare multiple projects or pull tasks from all across the account into a single view. To start, go to the Reporting tab and click Add Dashboard.
Starting with the template charts
You'll be prompted to choose a report to put on the dashboard, and if you're not sure what to report on, the template picker is a good way in. It also does a quiet second job, which is showing you the different types of things Asana can report on at all.
The templates cover questions like the status of the projects you have in progress, the estimated and actual time assigned to your team as a bar or line graph, how many portfolios you have and the status of the projects in them, and whether you have any overdue tasks.
Pick one and Asana sets the report up with all the necessary settings, which you can then tweak and customise.
Choosing overdue tasks by project, for example, builds the chart with the filters already in place. You can add more filters if you want, or leave it and click Add Chart. Once it's on the dashboard you can click and drag to resize it, as large or as small as you want.
The charts are interactive, which is the part people underestimate. Hover over any bar and you see the count. Click it and you drop into a detail view showing the actual tasks behind the number, so a report is a starting point for action rather than a picture of a problem.
Building a custom chart from scratch
Templates are a good place to start, but you can also build a widget from scratch, and this is where the difference between the two dashboard types bites. On a universal dashboard you can report on tasks, projects, portfolios or goals.
Go back into a project dashboard and create a chart there, and portfolios and goals aren't available. The report lives in a project, so the only object it can see is the tasks in that project.
Say you want a report showing the status of multiple projects. Set the object to projects, then choose where to pull them from: the entire account, specific teams, projects owned by a specific person, projects in a specific portfolio, or a list of projects you name yourself. For a whole-of-business view, pull from the entire account.
Then pick the chart type. You get bars, lines and donuts, and for a status breakdown a donut works nicely. Next choose how to group the data, which for this report means grouping by status so you can see what's on track and what's behind.
You can report on the count of projects, or, if you're using custom fields for things like time tracking, budgets or costs, on that data instead.
Down the bottom sit the filters. Archived projects are excluded by default, which makes sense, and you can also exclude projects that started before or after a certain date, or that sit in a particular team or portfolio, or based on a custom field.
Filters are where a report goes from technically correct to genuinely useful. If 22 of the projects in the chart don't have a status update, they're noise, and a filter showing only projects with a recent update strips them out. Then name the widget something that describes what it answers, active projects by status rather than projects by status, and add the chart.
The data is always current
The important thing to remember is that this is all real time. As tasks are completed and project statuses are updated, the dashboard updates itself. Nobody exports anything, nobody refreshes anything, and the report you looked at this morning is not the report you're looking at now.
The corollary matters more than the feature. The more your team are active and engaged and working in Asana, the more useful these reports and dashboards become, because the data behind them is closer to the truth.
Adding text and context
From the same Add menu you can drop blocks of text onto a dashboard. You can add any text you like, and images and other attachments as well, which is useful for a heading like Key Metrics or a short explanation of what the dashboard is for and how to read it.
It's a small feature and it does a lot of work when the dashboard is going to be seen by people who didn't build it.
What a working dashboard looks like
To give you a sense of what's possible, here's a dashboard built out properly. It has a widget for the number of overdue tasks by person on the team, which makes it obvious at a glance who needs chasing. Another shows who has the most tasks coming up this week.
There's a line graph showing total estimated and actual time tracked on all tasks across the entire account, and the same data again as a bar graph with the x axis changed to show people along the bottom, so you can see who's tracking a lot of actual time. Projects by status, incomplete tasks by person, and tasks completed over time all sit alongside it.
Goals are reportable too, so you can see how many goals are on track, achieved or behind. That's the sort of widget that turns a dashboard from a team management tool into something you'd put in front of a board.
Resourcing and workload
If what you actually care about is your team's capacity, the dashboard isn't where you should be looking. The Resourcing tab is, where you can create capacity plans to plan ahead for how people's time gets assigned across different projects.
There's also the workload view, which shows the estimated hours assigned to each person on your team in a more visual way than a chart can. Between the two, capacity questions get a better answer there than they do from a widget.
Custom fields let you report on any metric you like
This is where reporting goes to the next level. Set up a custom field in Asana and you can report on whatever that field holds. Back in the invoices project, the invoice amount column is a number field created under the Customize menu, and that single field is what makes financial reporting possible in a project management tool.
Numbers, percentages, currencies and other custom values all work the same way. So you can report on invoice amounts, or the cost of tasks in projects, or anything else you're prepared to capture on a task.
That project dashboard shows the total amount of unpaid invoices, and the widget behind it is doing something simple: counting incomplete tasks and summing that amount field. Mark a $33K invoice as done, go back to the dashboard, and the unpaid total drops to $21K on its own.
The same data broken down by section, using a section filter, splits supplier invoices from contractor invoices, and it can be shown as a donut. Shown over time instead, it tells an accounts team when each invoice is due to be paid, so outgoing payments can be planned rather than discovered.
Reporting on risks and other task types
Custom fields open up more than money. In one demo project there's a RAID log, which is a way of identifying the risks within a specific project. The project dashboard carries a report that groups tasks by risk type, so you can see how many risks and issues have been mitigated.
Mark one off as complete and the dashboard updates, the same as everything else. The pattern generalises: whatever you classify tasks by, you can report on.
Saving a dashboard into a project template
One final pro tip. You can save dashboards into a project template, so every project created from that template arrives with its reports already built.
The recommendation is to build it in the right order. Create the project as a project first, build the dashboard in the live project where you can see the charts populating with real data, then save the project as a template. A Pipedrive consulting template built this way carries a dashboard renamed to Time Tracker, and the original project it was built in has since been archived.
Inside the template the reports look empty, which is expected. They appear and populate when you create the live project from it.
Conclusion
Everyone loves a good dashboard, and if you're not sure where to start, talk to your boss and talk to your team. Ask what metrics you actually care about, then build a dashboard that answers exactly those questions.
Watch the full walkthrough if you want to see each chart being built, including the invoice widget updating live. Or reach out for a dedicated 1:1 or training session.
FAQ
Where do you create a dashboard in Asana? There are two places. Inside an individual project, using the Dashboard tab at the top of the project, or at the account level under the Strategy tab in the Reporting section. Where you build it determines what data the dashboard can see.
What's the difference between a project dashboard and a universal dashboard in Asana? A project dashboard only reports on the tasks in that specific project. A universal dashboard can report on tasks and projects from across the entire account, and lets you report on portfolios and goals as well, which a project dashboard can't.
Can you report on custom fields in Asana? Yes, and it's how you report on anything Asana doesn't track natively. Set up a number, percentage or currency custom field and the reporting can sum or group by it, which is how a dashboard ends up showing a total for unpaid invoices.
Do Asana dashboards update automatically? Yes. Reports are built on real time data, so as tasks are completed and project statuses change the dashboard updates itself. The more consistently a team works in Asana, the more accurate the reporting becomes.
What chart types can you use in Asana reporting? Bars, lines and donuts. You choose the object being reported on, where the data is pulled from, how it's grouped, and what's being measured, which can be a simple count or a value from a custom field.
Can you save a dashboard into an Asana project template? Yes. Build the dashboard in a live project first so you can see the charts working with real data, then save that project as a template. Every project created from the template will have the dashboard pre-built.