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What is the difference between a report and a dashboard?

A dashboard gives a quick, interactive overview of key metrics for monitoring and decisions, while a report is usually a more detailed, structured document or table for a specific period or purpose. Dashboards are for scanning, reports are for reading and record-keeping.

Dashboards: live or frequently refreshed, visual, filterable, focused on a few key questions.

Reports: often static or scheduled, detailed, formatted for printing or sharing, such as a monthly management pack.

Many businesses need both. A good pattern is a dashboard for daily monitoring that links to detailed tables for investigation, and a fixed monthly report produced from the same underlying data so the numbers agree.

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Published by Zansa · Last updated 2026-11-06 · Category: Integration and BI tools