Do your dashboards tell you what’s done, but not what’s actually happening? Because, same.
Before our team created ClickUp Dashboards, Monday meetings were a source of stress. Feature timelines slipped without notice, ad spend data hadn’t synced, and reporting lagged days behind the real work. Stakeholders wanted clarity, but all we had were stale metrics that told only half the story.
It was long overdue for us to switch to a solution that gave us a live, accurate pulse of our work.
In this blog post, we’ll share how teams at ClickUp use custom dashboards to track progress, catch issues early, and make every meeting more actionable. ✅
How ClickUp Uses Custom Dashboards for Real-Time Visibility
- What Are Custom Dashboards in ClickUp?
- Why Real-Time Visibility Matters
- Key Features of ClickUp Custom Dashboards
- How ClickUp Teams Use Custom Dashboards
- How to Set Up a Custom Dashboard in ClickUp: Step-by-Step Guide
- Best Practices for Using Dashboards in ClickUp
- Examples of Dashboard Use Cases
- Common Mistakes When Setting Up Dashboards
- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhat Are Custom Dashboards in ClickUp?
Custom ClickUp Dashboards are centralized visual workspaces that allow you to display and monitor key metrics, tasks, and project progress in one place.
They’re fully customizable, allowing you to create a comprehensive overview of your team’s performance, workload, and goals. Each Dashboard is built using different cards serving specific purposes. Standard card types include:
- Task lists: Displays tasks from any location, filters and groups them by status, assignee, or custom fields
- Charts: Visualizes data with bar, pie, battery, or line charts to track important metrics by assignee, status, or custom fields
- Goals: Tracks progress toward specific objectives, showing completion rates and milestones
- Workload: Monitors team capacity and work distribution, optimizing resource allocation
- Integrations: Embeds data from external tools (like forms, Figma designs, social media feeds, or third-party apps) to create a central hub
Real-time updates vs. static reporting
Here’s how ClickUp Dashboards stack up against conventional reporting methods. 👇🏼
| Feature | ClickUp Dashboards | Traditional static reporting |
| Update frequency | Updates in real time as tasks are completed or form submissions are received | Updates only at scheduled intervals or manually |
| Data accuracy | Reflects the latest information automatically | Reflects data only at the time of report creation |
| Flexibility | Offers live dashboards and scheduled PDF reports | Offers fixed reports at predetermined times |
| Interactivity | Allows drill-down and interactive insights | Allows viewing only; no interactivity |
| Use case | Monitors ongoing progress, team performance, and project status instantly | Shares snapshots for stakeholders or archives progress |
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhy Real-Time Visibility Matters
Whether you’re building a personal productivity dashboard or one for complex team projects, workflow transparency is necessary.
Here are three key benefits of real-time visibility:
Faster decision-making
When your work dashboard reflects the latest data, you don’t need to wait for end-of-day updates or weekly custom reports. You can spot trends, shifts, or issues and act immediately. That speed can make the difference between meeting deadlines and blowing past them.
📮 ClickUp Insight: 78% of our survey respondents make detailed plans as part of their goal-setting processes. However, a surprising 50% don’t track those plans with dedicated tools. 👀
With ClickUp, you seamlessly convert goals into actionable tasks, allowing you to conquer them step by step. Plus, no-code ClickUp Dashboards provide clear visual representations of your progress, giving you more control and visibility over your work. Because “hoping for the best” isn’t a reliable strategy.
💫 Real Results: ClickUp users say they can take on ~10% more work without burning out.
Proactive risk management
Seeing specific tasks slip, workload becoming imbalanced, or goal progress stagnating in real time gives you early warnings. Based on your observations, reassign tasks, shift priorities, or escalate issues while there’s still a cushion.
Improved team alignment
A shared dashboard means everyone sees the same data. Team members, stakeholders, and leaders all have visibility into what’s happening. That common context helps ensure folks stay focused on the right priorities and eliminates confusion about the status of work.
🧠 Fun Fact: The word ‘dashboard’ originally referred to a board on a horse-drawn carriage placed at the front to protect the driver from mud and debris ‘dashed up’ by the horses’ hooves. Over time, as horseless carriages evolved into automobiles, the term stuck, gradually shifting from a mud-deflector to the instrument panel displaying speed, fuel, gauges, and controls.
Summarize this article for me pleaseKey Features of ClickUp Custom Dashboards
Here are some key ClickUp features you should know to create customized dashboards:
Customize layouts with drag-and-drop cards
Move and resize cards on Dashboards to design a space that fits your workflow. Just click and drag a card to move it; other cards automatically adjust to maintain the layout.
Want to show more detail? Hover over the sides or corners of a card to resize it. Dashboards also include an Auto Layout option that removes space between cards.
💡 Pro Tip: If you make a mistake, use the undo shortcut (CMD+Z on Mac or CTRL+Z on Windows) to reverse the changes.
Monitor progress with real-time data updates
Dashboard cards pull directly from live task and goal data, ensuring your visuals stay accurate as work progresses.
Each card automatically reflects recent updates, such as completed tasks, updated goals, or new time entries, ensuring you always view the most relevant information.
ClickUp Dashboards auto-refresh every 30 minutes by default, keeping data synced without manual effort. You can also refresh individual cards or the entire Dashboard manually, with the last refresh time displayed beneath each card name for complete transparency.
View performance with cross-project visibility
Dashboards aren’t limited to a single List or Folder. You can combine data across multiple Spaces, Folders, or Lists, giving you a holistic view across projects.
This means you can create high-level executive dashboards or people analytics dashboards that span several projects, giving your stakeholders a unified view of progress, workload, and key metrics.
🔍 Did You Know? When people see real-time results of their actions, they naturally adjust their behavior faster. Psychologists call it the ‘feedback loop effect’. That’s why visibility tools motivate better performance.
Unify tools with third-party integration
ClickUp Dashboards make it easy to bring data and content from other third-party tools into one central view, providing live, interactive information right on your Dashboard.
Embed cards display content from other websites or apps directly inside ClickUp. Add Google Slides, Figma designs, Google Sheets, YouTube videos, Typeform responses, and more.
💡 Pro Tip: To add an Embed Card, first open your Dashboard in ClickUp and click + Add Card in the top-right corner. Select Embeds and Apps from the sidebar, then choose the type of card you want. Use helpful links or codes that your team actively references, such as live project timelines, survey results, or design prototypes.
Track results with custom KPI calculations
Calculation Cards in ClickUp let you calculate and display metrics, like profit and loss, actual vs. estimated time spent on tasks, work completion rates, or cost of parts and labor.
Each Calculation Card can be configured to measure key data points such as ClickUp Custom Fields (including formulas), sprint points, task count, time estimates, or time tracked.
You can then apply mathematical functions such as sum, count, average, median, min, max, or range to calculate your KPIs.
💡 Pro Tip: Click +Add Card and then select your preferred card. Configure the settings by:
- Selecting the data source
- Choosing the data point
- Applying a Calculation Function
Summarize this article for me pleaseHow ClickUp Teams Use Custom Dashboards
To make things easier for you, we’ve broken down how we use dashboards to track performance, spot bottlenecks, and enhance team productivity. 👇🏼
Step #1: Centralize project data in one view
We start by pulling all our project data into one unified Dashboard. The tool automatically pulls data from multiple Spaces, Folders, or Lists, giving us a complete view across projects and departments.
Here’s what Dayana Mileva, Account Director, Pontica Solutions, had to say about ClickUp:
Step #2: Track key metrics and KPIs
Once our data is in place, we focus on numbers that actually drive outcomes, such as delivery timelines, burn rate, campaign ROI, or workload balance.
Apart from the Calculation Cards (that we use to measure task completion rates and profit margins), we rely on a few other cards for better workflow orchestration:
- Portfolio cards: Provide a high-level view of progress across multiple Lists or Folders, comparing how different projects or campaigns are progressing against timelines and goals
- Sprint cards: Visualize sprint health and delivery trends with:
- Burndown card: Displays remaining work versus time, helping us gauge if we’re on track to complete the sprint
- Burnup card: Highlights completed work against the total scope, giving us a quick sense of progress toward sprint goals
- Cumulative flow card: Visualizes work distribution across stages, helping us identify bottlenecks
- Velocity card: Measures the average work your team completed in the last three to ten sprints
- Time tracking cards: Help us monitor how much time teams are spending on tasks, making them useful for client billing, capacity planning, and identifying where time sinks affect delivery
Step #3: Visualize work with charts
We mix and match pre-built and custom cards to make insights pop. They help teams spot trends, bottlenecks, and progress at a glance.
For visual storytelling, we rely on Chart Cards in our project management dashboards, such as:
- Bar charts to compare metrics, like tasks completed by each team or campaign performance across months
- Line charts to reveal trends over time, showing how workloads, delivery rates, or performance metrics evolve sprint by sprint
- Pie charts to break things down by category, such as task status or priority levels, making it easy to see what’s taking up the most attention
- Battery charts to show progress toward goals or completion percentages in a quick, visual snapshot
- Goals cards to track long-term objectives and monitor progress towards company or project-level goals
Step #4: Customize Dashboards per role or team
Every team needs a different lens on their work, so we build dashboards that reflect that. The CEO dashboard includes company-wide metrics, while Operations gets a look at efficiency data and marketing tracks campaign performance.
Permissions settings give us full control over who sees what. Set to private, share with specific teams, or make dashboards public across the Workspace, with view-only or edit access.
Step #5: Automate updates and alerts
To eliminate busywork, we automate alerts using ClickUp Automations that update task statuses, assign tasks, set due dates, and add comments when certain triggers occur.
As Automations update tasks, all changes are instantly reflected in Dashboards.
For example, when a sales lead is marked as ‘Won,’ an automation updates the task status and assigns it to the onboarding team. The Dashboard instantly reflects the new deal in sales metrics, alerting the team to start their process.
To take it even further, you can use scheduled dashboard reports to send static snapshot reports (e.g., PDF exports) to clients or executives at regular intervals (daily, weekly, etc.).
🚀ClickUp Advantage: ClickUp Brain brings intelligence straight into your Dashboards, turning static data into actionable insights. You can simply ask anything, from ‘What did my team complete this week?’ to ‘Which projects are behind?’ and get quick answers right inside your Dashboard.
To take it a step further, use ClickUp AI Cards.
Powered by ClickUp Brain, AI tools with access to real-time data include:
- AI Brain card: Run tailored prompts, mention tasks or docs, and even attach files for smarter insights
- AI StandUp & Team StandUp cards: Get quick daily or weekly summaries of work done by you or your team
- AI Executive Summary & Project Update cards: Generate concise overviews of progress, blockers, and upcoming priorities
Summarize this article for me pleaseHow to Set Up a Custom Dashboard in ClickUp: Step-by-Step Guide
Here’s a simple walkthrough to help you create a digital workplace that delivers clarity, focus, and real-time visibility.
Step #1: Identify your team’s KPIs and goals
Before creating your Dashboard, decide which metrics truly matter to your team.
For example, a product team might track sprint velocity or bug count while marketing might monitor campaign ROI.
Start by listing out the metrics to ensure alignment:
- Project progress and completion rate
- Task status breakdowns (In Progress, Overdue Tasks, Blocked)
- Resource and workload balance per assignee
- Billable vs. non-billable hours
- Campaign ROI and performance by channel
- Task turnaround and cycle time
- Goal progress and milestone achievement
- Upcoming deliverable timelines and dependencies
🔍 Did You Know? Psychologist Albert Mehrabian found that 93% of communication is nonverbal. This makes dashboards beat real data dumps in grabbing attention.
Step #2: Create a new dashboard or use a template
1. Go to the Dashboards Hub and click the + icon to create a new dashboard
2. Choose a Dashboard template (like Project Management, Sprint Reporting, or Time Tracking) or select Start from scratch
3. If you’re using a project management template, choose the source of your data. This can be a specific Space, Folder, or List
Step #3: Add relevant cards (conditional)
Now, if you’ve chosen the ‘Start from scratch’ option, you’ll land on a blank dashboard where you can begin adding cards, the building blocks of your Dashboard.
You’ll find options like Workload by Status, Portfolio, Calculation, Time Reporting, and a range of connected AI Cards to visualize different types of data.
P.S. Even if you started with a prebuilt template, you can still tailor it to your workflow. Just click Add Card in the top-right corner.
🚀 ClickUp Advantage: We’ve been using ClickUp BrainGPT across our teams, and honestly, there’s no turning back.
It lets us extract insights, trends, and summaries from ClickUp and any external third-party project management tools, directly into our custom dashboards. When we’re on the go, we use its Talk-to-Text functionality for real-time project updates and executive overviews.
Check it out!
Step #4: Apply filters
Once your cards are in place, use Dashboard Filters (in edit mode) to apply criteria like status, assignee, priority, or location. These filters affect all supported cards in that Dashboard.
For instance, you can filter dashboards by location to view data from specific locations or by time range (like ‘created this week’ or ‘closed this month’) to spot trends.
Then, refine further using Card Filters to narrow down a specific widget. An operations dashboard might filter for tasks tagged ‘In Progress,’ while a marketing dashboard pulls metrics only from campaign folders.
🔍 Did You Know? Humans are wired to crave progress. Checking off a task triggers a dopamine hit in your brain, creating a feel-good feedback loop that keeps you motivated to make progress.
Step #5: Set permissions and sharing
Once your Dashboard is ready, it’s time to decide who can access it and what they can do with it. ClickUp gives you control over visibility and permissions so every stakeholder sees only what’s relevant to them.
To share from the Dashboard view:
- Open your Dashboard and click Share in the upper-right corner
- At the bottom, select Share this view
- Choose how you want to share it and set permissions. You’ll see:
- Private link: Copy and share it with anyone who already has access to the Space, Folder, or List connected to the Dashboard
- Permissions: Choose between View only or Edit access. You can apply permissions to everyone at once using Edit all as well
- Private view: Keep the Dashboard visible only to you
💡 Pro Tip: Generate PDF versions of your Dashboard to share them offline. Click Dashboard view > Save as PDF.
Step #6: Iterate based on feedback and reporting needs
Once your Dashboard is live and shared with your team, it’s meant to evolve with your projects.
Start by gathering feedback from the people who use it most, including project managers, ops leads, or marketing teams, and see which metrics or visuals they rely on daily.
From there, continuously improve your dashboards:
- Add or remove cards based on what’s truly useful for decision-making
- Adjust filters to highlight current priorities or upcoming goals
- Reorganize layouts to surface the most relevant data first
- Automate refreshes and updates so your dashboards always reflect real-time performance
Summarize this article for me pleaseBest Practices for Using Dashboards in ClickUp
These best practices will help you keep your dashboards relevant, insightful, and easy to act on as your team and priorities evolve. 💫
- Choose the right dashboard type/location: Use Dashboard Views when you want your team to access the Dashboard alongside their day-to-day work. Dashboards in the Hub are better for cross-project or executive-level visibility
- Use consistent naming and data hygiene: Ensure Spaces, Lists, Custom Fields, and Statuses are standardized before feeding them into Dashboards. For example, if one team uses ‘Done’ and another ‘Completed,’ metrics can become inconsistent
- Color-code intentionally: Use meaningful color cues, such as green for on-track, red for at risk, yellow for pending, so users can interpret dashboard status at a glance
👀 ClickUp Hack: We create drill-down views of charts or cards to see task-level detail. That helps catch changes, trends, or blockers early.
Here’s a guide to creating a powerful PM dashboard! 🤩
Summarize this article for me pleaseExamples of Dashboard Use Cases
Here are some dashboard examples in ClickUp and how different teams use them to stay on top of goals, projects, and performance metrics:
Team workload dashboard
The team workload dashboard visualizes who’s working on what, tracks capacity limits, and ensures fair task allocation. This way, we can:
- Identify who’s over or under capacity and reassign work accordingly
- Add time estimates and priorities so our team members focus on high-impact work
- Improve transparency with clear ownership across every project
👀 ClickUp Hack: Our managers use Workload Cards within prebuilt dashboards to monitor resource allocation and predict when to add or shift team members based on real-time capacity data.
Personal productivity dashboard
For individual contributors or team leads, this Dashboard is a daily command center. It shows what’s pending, in progress, or done, keeping us focused on what truly matters.
We use it to:
- Track daily, weekly, or monthly goals with Task List and Progress Cards
- Spot time-draining tasks and reprioritize with ease
- Turn insights into action by linking tasks directly from Lists or Spaces
📮 ClickUp Insight: Think those “mild distractions” from invisible work aren’t a big deal? They are.
For 28% of employees, the small interruptions and constant task juggling chip away at valuable deep work, reducing overall productivity and adding to their mental load.
With ClickUp’s Dashboards and personalized Home view, you can build a personal productivity dashboard that gives you a crystal-clear, panoramic overview of all your work, including those unseen tasks.
Identify where your time is truly going, and empower yourself to prioritize intelligently.
CRM visualization dashboard
For customer success or account management teams, this dashboard design provides a 360° view of client relationships. This setup lets us:
- Monitor customer satisfaction, support response times, and renewal health
- Identify churn risks through visual trend analysis
- Track revenue potential across pipelines using Line Charts and Pie Charts
Marketing campaign dashboard
Marketing teams use this to monitor campaign performance, marketing roadmap, and goal progress in one place. We can:
- Visualize content reach, engagement, and conversion metrics in real time
- Compare MQLs to actual sales outcomes with Goal Cards and Bar Charts
- Track multiple campaign timelines and performance KPIs side-by-side
💡 Pro Tip: Some project managers swear by gamifying dashboards, adding icons and emojis for completed tasks. Who doesn’t like instant virtual applause?
Client portal dashboard
Perfect for agencies and service-based teams that collaborate on client projects, this client dashboard lets you:
- Share progress, workloads, and updates in real time through guest access
- Use Cumulative Flow, Burndown, or Velocity Charts to showcase delivery timelines
- Keep communication centralized with comments, chat, and document sharing
Sales overview dashboard
For growth managers and revenue teams, this Dashboard offers a snapshot of sales health and performance to:
- Visualize revenue by product, customer, or region
- Compare targets vs. actuals to identify performance gaps
- Use ClickUp Brain to generate trend forecasts and optimize strategies
Summarize this article for me pleaseCommon Mistakes When Setting Up Dashboards
Even the best project dashboards can lose their value if not set up thoughtfully.
Here are some common pitfalls to avoid (some we face too!) for an actionable dashboard:
- Overloading with too many cards: Tracking everything at once clutters your Dashboard and creates decision fatigue. Keep only what drives action, and move lesser-used metrics to secondary dashboards
- Ignoring layout and visual hierarchy: Dashboards are a visual story. Place key KPIs in larger cards and primary positions, and group supporting data below or to the side
- Allowing data to go stale: Dashboards auto-refresh every 30 minutes, but disabling this or ignoring the last refresh timestamp can lead to outdated insights. Always confirm your data is current before analyzing or reporting
- Failing to connect goals to metrics: Dashboards that only show activity (such as task counts) without tying it to outcomes (like campaign ROI or sprint completion) miss the bigger picture. Align every metric with a measurable business goal
Summarize this article for me pleaseTurn Data Into Decisions With ClickUp Dashboards
Every missed update or overlooked task can slow our progress, and sometimes derail a project entirely. The real cost is lost clarity and confidence in knowing what’s happening right now.
ClickUp, the everything app for work, brings all your projects, tasks, and team data together in a converged AI workspace. Custom Dashboards let you track progress, workload, and priorities in real time. Visual cards, such as Bar, Pie, and Line Charts, highlight trends and bottlenecks.
ClickUp Brain gives you context by generating summaries, identifying blockers, and recommending next steps in just a few seconds.
Sign up for ClickUp for free today!
Summarize this article for me pleaseFrequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
1. What is a custom dashboard in ClickUp?
A custom dashboard in ClickUp is a personalized workspace that consolidates key project metrics, tasks, and team performance indicators into a visual interface. Users can add various cards to monitor progress, identify bottlenecks, and make informed decisions.
2. How do ClickUp Dashboards provide real-time visibility?
ClickUp Dashboards sync directly with your tasks, projects, and workflows. As updates occur, cards on the Dashboard refresh instantly, providing an up-to-date snapshot of your team’s activities.
3. What types of customizable widgets can be used for tracking metrics?
ClickUp provides a diverse range of custom widgets to track various metrics, including:
Bar, pie, and line charts: Visualize task statuses, workload distributions, and progress over time
Battery charts: Monitor task completion percentages
Assignee cards: View tasks assigned to specific team members
Time tracking cards: Track hours worked on tasks or projects
Goal tracking cards: Measure progress towards specific objectives
4. How can dashboards improve team performance?
Dashboards provide a unified view of key metrics and progress indicators. With real-time data, teams can quickly identify and address issues, allocate resources effectively, and stay aligned with project goals.
5. Can dashboards be customized per team or role?
Yes, ClickUp Dashboards can be fully customized to suit different teams or roles. Users can create multiple dashboards tailored to specific functions, such as marketing, development, or sales, each displaying the most pertinent data.
Everything you need to stay organized and get work done.
