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Hubsessed Office Hours: Reporting & Dashboards

Hubsessed Office Hours - Reporting and Dashboards - Oct 14, 2026

  • Joshua OakesHost
  • Madelyn DonovanHost

Wednesday, October 14, 2026

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Zach Hussion brought a client's question: how do you generate a work order or other signable document from HubSpot data, natively? We talked through PDFs as a dead end in a workflow, data sets as a safe sandbox, tech debt, and what to say when the numbers don't look right.

Clips from this session

Key takeaways

Treat a PDF as a dead end in a workflow or as exhaust, not an active part of it; track the work itself, such as the work order, and let the document come out of it.

Before bending reports and dashboards to do something they weren't designed to do, ask whether the thing can be built exactly the way you need it, such as a button that makes a PDF of any record.

Sharing a report by email as a PDF has to be configured a certain way and doesn't show text, so weigh it against other ways to generate a document.

Watch for tech debt: calculated properties and workflows built only to make a report work. Report-level formulas and Data Studio data set calculations can now handle some of that.

Give a stakeholder group an 80/20 data set, filtered to what they care about, with columns named in their language and confusing or deprecated properties left out, so the only thing they can change is how they slice the data.

Help people tell trusting the data apart from trusting the report: if they trust the data, they only need help building the report.

Glanceable reports on leading indicators work as an immune system trigger: when that number changes, investigate.

When someone says the numbers don't look right, don't answer that the report configuration hasn't changed; check dashboard filters and owner properties, translate their question, and seek first to understand.

Questions answered

  1. 00:00Welcome to Reporting and DashboardsTopic
  2. 01:07What are some creative ways to generate a document like a work order from HubSpot data, natively?Question
  3. 08:12Sharing a report as a PDF, and where it falls shortTopic
  4. 15:04Push back on bending reports, and a PDF this record buttonTopic
  5. 22:22Reporting as the one tangible anchor in a conversation about changeTopic
  6. 26:40When it comes to tech debt, are there specific scenarios where someone opts to track something a certain way and it ends up not being the right approach long term?Question
  7. 31:58How do you deal with enablement of the folks who want to create new dashboards or reports based on really liking what you built with data sets, without needing to teach them data sets?Question
  8. 36:05A CEO who asks GPT first, and trusting the data versus the reportTopic
  9. 39:20When the numbers don't look right: leading indicators as an immune system triggerTopic
  10. 42:18What is an example of a bad question in response to someone saying it doesn't look right to them?Question
  11. 47:52Reporting boot camp, and how to join a live sessionTopic

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