Hubsessed Office Hours: Reporting and Dashboards

Data sets instead of copy-paste

Joshua Oakes · Wednesday, October 21, 2026

When a team builds its numbers by typing them into a spreadsheet, somebody eventually keys 31 for 13, and then everyone is arguing about whether the data is accurate. In Office Hours I told the story of a CEO who built his own reporting spreadsheet and used it for about five years. Every number was typed in by hand each week, weeks had to be split across months, and there was constant conflict over whether the data could be trusted. Here is how I solved it in HubSpot: 1. Build a data set of the metrics in Data Hub. A data set is a table where you define and rename your metrics and do the calculations once, like turning "date entered this stage" into a count you can report on. 2. Send that data to Google Sheets on a nightly basis. 3. Use the drop-downs on the reporting sheet, and the client-facing page filters itself. No copy paste, and nobody retyping a number. Setting up a data set is hard to show without real data, and you can still take the idea from the session. The full session: https://www.hubsessed.io/office-hours/reporting-dashboards/2026-10-21