Goals

We've found that customers have a wide variety of use cases around goals. To help facilitate the differing approaches, we have two main approaches to goals now:

For simple monthly goals, you can automatically define and use these goals from trend charts, crosstabs, gauges, and month over month reports. These goals can be across your entire data set or per a single grouping. For example, you can do the following:

• A single monthly sales goal across your organization
• A monthly gross margin % for your organization
• An hours worked total by team member and month
• A tickets resolved total by agent and moment
• A sales goal by sales rep and month

For more complex goals, you can do any of the following depending on your particular use cases:

• Compare against a year/office/sales rep combination as imported by a spreadsheet data source
• Set up an initial monthly goal value through a user data source, then have the months auto fill forward or backward until you specify a new goal value for a new month
• Compare against goals set up in Google Sheets
• Compare against budgets configured in your accounting system

With these more complex cases, you'll typically be setting up a combined data source and using date comparison reports rather than using dedicated goal functionality within Easy Insight itself.

To use simple monthly goals, your report must meet the following criteria:

• If it's a trend chart, the report's X axis must be a date field set to the month level.
• If it's a crosstab, either the column (X axis) or row (Y axis) must be a date field set to the month level. If you're customizing the goal per grouping, the goal grouping must be the alternate axis of the crosstab.
• If it's a month over month report, the date must be set to the month level.

If your report meets the above criteria, you can go to Configuration -> Report Properties -> Report Processing and enable the 'Inline Goals' and/or 'Goal Setup' options. The Inline Goals will automatically render any configured goals on the report, while the Goal Setup option will enable designers to set goal values through the report.

Once you enable the Inline Goal option, the report will automatically apply formatting to show the goal in the form of a line and coloring for trend charts and in the form of cell shading for month over month and crosstab reports:

With the Goal Setup option, you can choose 'Configure Goals' from the report header when the report is in a dashboard:

Clicking this link will give you the ability to customize your goals directly from the report:

By default, goal setup is across your entire data set, so for example setting a sales goal across your company by month. If you want to set up a sales goal per sales rep per month, you'll need to have a dashboard or report level filter on sales rep. Edit the filter, then enable the 'Default Goal' option:

When you to go to edit goals, it'll look for any filters with that Default Goal set. If you have multiple filters with Default Goal enabled, you'll receive an error message.

If you have a dashboard level filter but only want to make it a Default Goal filter in the context of a particular report, you can edit the report, go to Configuration -> Additional Report Scripting, and add the following line:

                        
                            goalfilter("your filter name")
                        
                    

In particular, this can be useful in the following scenario. If you want to have the following sort of display per sales rep, with the ability to customize a goal per sales rep:

First, create your trend chart report with the goal date as the X axis and set the goal measure (sales total, quantity, gross profit, GM%, etc), and set the Inline Goals and Goal Setup options:

In your dashboard, drag in the Repeater option from the left, choose your report, and choose the field for the goal (Sales Rep in this example).

If we already have a filter on Sales Rep on the dashboard, we can delete the filter that the repeater creates, then go back to our trend chart report and add the goalfilter script. With this done, we get a trend chart per rep with the option to easily configure and visualize the goal.