Making Embedded Dashboards Easy to Manage at Commspace

We’ve seen SaaS companies do amazing stuff with the data their platform is generating. One of them is Johan Vosloo, CEO at Commspace, who showed us how they use dashboards embedded in their platform.

And it’s simply jaw-dropping.

In the video below, Commspace explains how they use Luzmo to integrate dashboards in their platform, and how they built a clever UI on top of it to add, manage and change the dashboards inside their platform with ease. Just the way they want it, within the toolstack they know and love.

Company Profile: Commspace

Commspace is a SaaS platform for financial advisers to easily track and manage their commissions.

Clients get a 360° view on their commissions and fees per provider, per product or per client over time. In addition, you can easily set up rules for commission sharing and splitting in the platform.

The platform helps financial advisers to fully automate the process of commissions. And to finally get a better insight into their commission management.

The challenge: how to approach client facing reporting?

One of Commspace’s challenges was to give their clients a “big picture” view on their commission data. This reporting should easily answer questions such as:

Which products generated the most revenue last year?
What % of our monthly turnover is recurring revenue?
What is the average revenue per client for 1 specific adviser or product?

In order to tackle this challenge, they introduced Commspace Analytics, a complete reporting section inside the Commspace platform.

The solution: how Commspace implemented a dashboard integration

In order to add this reporting layer to their platform, Commspace combined third-party tools with in-house development. They used:

Luzmo as the dashboard layer, fully embedded into their own platform
In-house development of an interface to manage the integrated dashboards

In their tutorial video, you can see in detail how they manage the reporting component of their platform. Now let’s run through this together step by step.

Step 1: build the dashboards in Luzmo

In order to create reports for the platform, Commspace uses the intuitive Luzmo dashboard editor. In Luzmo, they use 2 different user accounts:

Editor users: with these accounts, they create new dashboards or make draft changes to existing dashboards that are in production
Production users: these accounts contain only dashboards that are currently live & visible to customers on the platform

As a result, the dashboards in production are much better protected. Commspace makes ongoing changes in draft. Hence, changes are only visible to the end-customer when pushed into production. This ensures the best customer experience.

Commspace chose to work with different accounts to ensure solid protection. In addition, you can also use dashboard versioning to protect in-production dashboards. This allows you to publish a live version of your dashboard, and still make edits in the dashboard interface without your changes being reflected in production.

Step 2: manage the dashboards in a custom-built admin portal

Commspace has made it super simple to expose a new Luzmo dashboard in their platform. In particular, they built a dashboard management section on top of the integration. It lets you do a number of things:

Add new dashboards to the platform
Delete dashboards from the platform
Specify which clients have access to each dashboard, based on their role, company, office or even custom tags
Define the order of the dashboards in the dropdown
Load dashboards with a specific date filter when opened

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This means they don’t have to implement or change things directly in the code. As a result, they can now manage & handle their integrated dashboards with just a few clicks!

Commspace dashboard management portal — Commspace admin portal to manage the integrated dashboards

To create this interface, Commspace uses the Luzmo Integration API. With the API, you can make a deeper integration with your own web application possible. For example, allow to communication between your dashboards and application, or reuse the data a user selected somewhere else in your application to trigger an action.

Step 3: the reporting section in Commspace

The result of combining easy dashboarding with a clever UI? A stunning reporting section for all of Commspace’s clients.

To begin with, clients simply select the report they want to show. Subsequently, this triggers the right dashboard to load in the app thanks to a multi-tenant setup. Although the dashboards are built in Luzmo, they are styled to integrate seamlessly within the Commspace branding.

Commspace embedded analytics module with Luzmo — Commspace embedded analytics module

Moreover, Commspace users can filter these report views to include or exclude certain offices. The dashboards are also fully interactive. So, they can further drill down on a specific time period or any other measure.