Hubsessed Office Hours Recap: Reporting and Dashboards, October 7, 2026

Our first Office Hours for Reporting and Dashboards kept coming back to one idea: a report is worth building once everyone agrees on what it means. Joshua Oakes and Madelyn Donovan talked through definitions and the denominator, numbers versus data, color with a purpose, reports on records, the new report view on index pages and a naming pattern for saved reports. This is the written recap of the session.

People don't always know what they need from a report

Madelyn Donovan started the first segment with a question for Joshua: what's the most fun you've had building a report lately? Joshua drew a line between fun and rewarding. His rewarding example needed cohort tables and pipeline reports that the custom report builder does not handle well, so he used Data Hub to build data sets and sent them each night into spreadsheets, where the tables and reports could be built. Now that it is figured out, he says, the process is complex but not terribly difficult, just a lot of effort.

Madelyn loves building reports because she is a very visual person, and because "so many people don't know that they're visual people" until they see the chart. That led to a theme we came back to all session: people don't always know what they need when they ask for a report. Joshua put it this way: admins and stakeholders use the same words, but "we're actually speaking different languages." Madelyn added that building a report often points out process issues before anyone looks at it. Watch Some people don't know they're visual until they see the chart.

Settle the denominator first

When a request comes in for a stage-to-stage report, Joshua's first question is the denominator, because some deals in a stage are not yet eligible to move forward. Ten deals, five advance, and the five left behind aren't eligible yet: is that 50 percent or 100 percent? It depends on what the stakeholder wants the report to represent, so he asks for 15 minutes to ask a couple of questions first.

He doesn't want the reputation of needling people in every meeting, but as he put it, "misleading reports are more dangerous than no data, right? Because you think you are making confident decisions, but you have no basis in reality."

Numbers are not data

Madelyn named two common gaps: you aren't tracking what you need to report on, or you are tracking something that doesn't represent how the business works. Joshua's line for it: "what we have here is numbers but what we don't have here is data."

Early in a new engagement, he will add a key property to an index page's table, flip to report view and show how many records have it not set. That is how you find a backfill problem early.

Color with a purpose

"I love any excuse to color code a dashboard, but it's not just because of the colors," Madelyn said. She uses color to organize what people are looking at, so a high level report and the detail underneath it share a color and people can connect the dots. Joshua's most common use is a sales leader's dashboard where each rep keeps the same color across every report. It is manual setup today, but if your team is stable, it is close to fire and forget.

Joshua described reporting as data hygiene, data coverage and asking the right question, all to help people quickly make sense of information and make decisions. Madelyn suggested a Maslow's hierarchy of reporting, and Joshua put "can I make sense of it" at the bottom layer. Watch Maslow's hierarchy of reporting needs.

Reports on the record, reports above the data

A question from the chat asked about reports versus views on index pages. Madelyn has kept a dashboard in her back pocket for past limits of the deal board view, and for context about one company she prefers a report card on the company record, with things like when they became a customer and their last order date. Joshua uses report cards on a referral partner's record, so a rep can see that partner's opportunities at a glance before a check-in.

Madelyn named the catch: record cards only take single object reports, which is hard to explain to someone who just got excited about them. Joshua's plain way to explain it: "these are reports about this record. So we find them on this record. These are reports about all of your data. So we find them in a place that flies above all of your data."

Report view on index pages

Joshua then tried the new report view on a Contacts index page in a demo portal. It turns whatever the table view holds, with the same filters and columns, into a chart, so you can answer a quick question without creating a saved report. In his words, "it's like a report visualization for an arbitrary data set that you've put together using the filters." Clicking a value drills down, the same way a report does.

He reaches for it for quick asks, or to find out before a project starts, "how much of a disaster is the data?" Watch Report view on index pages for quick answers.

Intent, Breakdown, Timescale

A second question from the chat asked about naming conventions for saved reports. Madelyn admitted, "I am guilty of creating a lot of reports and then forgetting to delete them after I've used them." Her advice is consistency. A report can sit on several dashboards, so its name shouldn't depend on one dashboard's context, or say last week when a quick filter is doing that work. Keep "the concrete things in the name," and be descriptive while keeping it concise.

Joshua says naming breaks down most around date ranges and filters like owner. His pattern: "Intent, breakdown, timescale, separated by hyphens." The intent is what the report's audience calls it, in business terms. The breakdown is marked with an x. The timescale goes at the end as a short code, such as LW for last week, TM for this month or T90 for trailing 90 days. Madelyn noted that HubSpot's own templated report names follow a similar shape, and that she likes a table beside a chart so she can scan the numbers. Watch Intent, Breakdown, Timescale: naming saved reports.

Who is Dan?

Madelyn pointed out that two nearly identical reports, a table and a chart of the same data, can end up named exactly the same, or something totally different. Joshua added that they can also drift out of sync when someone saves a change to one without reading the warning. HubSpot tells you, as Joshua put it, "you're about to change this thing that appears on five dashboards," and some of those may be old, or belong to a Dan nobody remembers. Watch Who is Dan? Check the warning before you change a shared report.

We marked goals and forecasting as a topic for another week.

A wish list for HubSpot's reporting team

We closed on color. Madelyn likes that a color theme changes every report at once, but wishes she could apply certain colors to certain values. Joshua's wish, for any HubSpot reporting PMs who see this, is colors bound to the rows and columns of a data set, so every report on a dashboard gets the same colors for free. Madelyn would like to choose pattern fills, which gave Joshua flashbacks to dither patterns on black and white screens, and she suggested reusing the colors a property's options already have.

As Madelyn said, "Josh and I can yap all day long about this nerdy stuff," so bring your questions. In Joshua's words, "You don't have to show us your most embarrassing reports or any data from your portal to ask questions."

Send your questions between sessions to community@hubsessed.io.