Dashboard

The dashboard is the first screen you see in the admin area. It answers the questions you open the admin for: how are sales going, who needs paying, which winners are waiting, and is anything going wrong at checkout. Every list on it is clickable, so you can dig into an order, customer or competition without leaving the page.

Where to find it: Admin → Dashboard (/admin).

Pick a reporting period

Most figures are scoped to the period selected at the top right.

1. Click Today or Last 7 days for the two quick ranges.
2. For a longer range, click the third button (it opens a small menu) and pick Last 30 days, This month or Last month. The button then shows whichever you chose.

The period-scoped figures reload straight away. Your choice is remembered in your browser, so the dashboard reopens on the same period next time.

Which range to use:

• Last 30 days is a rolling window that always looks back 30 days from now, so mid-month it blends two partial months together.
• This month starts fresh on the 1st, so it matches how you reconcile monthly figures.
• Last month is the whole of the previous calendar month.

New Customers, Sales and Upsell show a small change chip comparing this period with the one before it. Hover it to see the exact figure and what it is comparing against: vs yesterday on Today, vs prior 7 days on Last 7 days, vs prior 30 days on Last 30 days, vs last month to the same point on This month (so day 17 compares against the first 17 days of last month, not the whole thing), and vs the month before on Last month. The chip only appears when there was activity in the previous window to compare against, so a quiet period shows no chip rather than a misleading one.

Some figures ignore the period entirely and always show the current state of your site: Unactioned Winners, Pending Orders, Whale Spotting, Next Ending Competition, Prize Fulfilment, the Cash Liability headline, Live carts now on Checkout Conversion, and In progress on Referrals. Switching period will not change them.

Work through winners that need actioning

The Unactioned Winners card counts winners who have been drawn but not yet processed. It highlights whenever the count is above zero, whatever period you are looking at.

1. Check the number on the card.
2. Click Open Win Manager.
3. Work through the queue on the Winners page.

Check profit for the period

The full-width Profit & Loss widget gives you the period's financial position in four figures: Cash Revenue, Total Costs, Profit / Loss and Margin.

1. Set the period you want to measure.
2. Open the dropdown inside the Total Costs box and choose a cost scenario:
   • Realised: money actually received, minus costs already paid (prize costs, cash prize withdrawals and card refunds). Card processing fees are included when your site has fee rates configured.
   • Realised + today's pending: adds the cost of physical prizes for competitions ending later today. Useful before tonight's draws.
   • Worst case: adds cash sitting in customer wallets and assumes every open competition sells out and every prize is claimed at full cost. Cash instant win prizes are counted only once they are won, and the projection reflects today's open competitions whatever date range you picked.
3. Read the Profit / Loss card. Its label changes with the scenario, for example "Worst case profit", so the number is never mistaken for the realised position.
4. Click View Full Report for the full revenue report at Admin → Reports → Revenue, which has its own date controls and more detail.

Switching scenario is instant and nothing reloads. Your choice is remembered in your browser and shared with the revenue report, so both surfaces show the same view.

Cash Revenue excludes wallet credit and has card refunds subtracted, which is why it is usually lower than the Sales card. Where there were no cash takings in the period, the Margin box reads No margin rather than 0%, because a margin on nothing is undefined.

If a yellow "Some prize costs not configured - P&L may be incomplete" note appears, at least one prize has no cost recorded, so costs and margin are understated in every scenario. Add costs to those prizes on the Competitions pages.

Open an order, customer or competition

You can investigate without leaving the dashboard:

• Click an order in Whale Spotting or the Activity feed to open the order details panel, the same slide-over you get on the Orders page.
• Click a customer or winner in the Activity feed to open their profile in a read-only side panel.
• Click a competition in Most Popular Competitions to open a competition preview panel.

Close the panel and you land back on the dashboard exactly where you were.

To watch events as they happen, use the Activity feed. A green Live dot means it is connected in real time, and items that arrive while you are watching carry a New badge. Click the expand icon in the feed header to fill the screen with it; press Escape or click the dark area outside to close. Clicking an item also closes the expanded view and opens the relevant panel.

Investigate a drop in checkout conversion

Two widgets tell you whether money is being lost at the payment step.

1. Look at Checkout Conversion, the share of started checkouts that were paid. It shows green at 70% and above, amber at 40% and above, and red below that. Abandoned counts checkouts that timed out without payment, and Recoverable is the total value of those.
2. Look at the Decline rate under the Payment Methods chart. This is the share of card attempts refused by the card issuer or your payment provider. Reservation timeouts and customer cancellations are excluded. Green below 5%, amber from 5%, red from 10%. If you use more than one payment provider, each one's rate is listed separately.
3. If the decline rate is amber or red, open the Orders page and look at recent failed orders for a pattern. One customer retrying is not the same problem as widespread failures.
4. Raise a widespread decline problem with your payment provider.

Live carts now on the Checkout Conversion card is a point-in-time count of baskets whose reservation has not yet expired, so it is useful for judging whether a spike is happening right now.

Chase prizes that have not shipped

The Prize Fulfilment card groups unfulfilled physical prizes by how long the winner has been waiting: 0 to 3, 4 to 7, 8 to 14, and 15 or more days. Credit, cash and ticket prizes cannot be shipped, so they are excluded.

1. Check the colour of the headline. Once the oldest prize has waited 8 days the card turns amber and shows "Oldest waiting N days". At 15 days it turns red.
2. Note the counts in the orange (8 to 14 days) and red (15+ days) rows.
3. Chase them on the Winners page.

Review flagged accounts

If a red banner reading "N account flags need review" appears above the widgets, your site has found accounts that may belong to the same person. It is worth checking promptly, particularly before paying out prizes.

1. Click the banner. It opens the account flags queue at Admin → Users → Account Flags.
2. Review each case. See Account Flags for how to investigate and resolve them.

The banner only shows while flags are waiting and disappears once the queue is clear.

Start a new competition

If your role can create competitions, a New Competition button sits at the top right of the dashboard and opens the competition creation form. See Competitions for the full walkthrough.

Customise the dashboard layout

You can rearrange, resize and hide widgets to suit how you work. Your layout is saved automatically in your browser, so it is per device: customising on your desktop will not change what you see on your laptop or phone.

1. Click Customize at the top of the page. On a phone, tap the grid icon next to the title instead.
2. A Customize Dashboard bar appears at the top and every card gets a blue outline plus its own controls in the bottom-right corner.
3. Drag any card to reorder it within its row or drop it into a different row.
4. Set a card's width with the S (small, one column), L (large, two to three columns) and F (full width) buttons. These buttons only appear on cards in rows that have more than one column, so the full-width Profit & Loss row shows none.
5. Make a card taller with the 3H button, on the cards that support it: Activity, Payment Methods, Whale Spotting and Most Popular. It toggles between standard and tall, so you see more entries without scrolling. Other cards have a set height.
6. Hide a card with the eye-slash icon. Hidden cards keep their place in the layout.
7. Bring a hidden card back by clicking Show Hidden (N) in the customise bar and picking it from the list. The button only appears when at least one card is hidden.
8. Click Done to leave customise mode.

Changes save as you go, so there is nothing else to confirm.

To put everything back to the standard arrangement (positions, sizes and hidden cards all included), click Reset in the customise bar.

If a new widget is added to the platform later, it appears automatically at the end of its default row, so a customised layout never hides it from you.

Catch up on platform updates

The bell labelled What's New next to the Dashboard title lists recent platform updates: new features, improvements and fixes, each dated. Entries you have not seen carry a New badge, and features still being refined carry a Beta badge.

A small blue dot on the bell means there is something unread. The panel also opens by itself when you sign in and there are unseen updates. Click Got it to close it and mark everything as read.

What each widget shows

The dashboard has 15 widgets. By default they sit in three rows: the headline cards, then Profit & Loss full width, then the monitoring widgets.

Headline cards

Widget	What it shows
Unactioned Winners	Winners drawn but not yet processed. Highlights above zero. Links to the Win Manager.
New Customers	Customers who registered in the period, with a change chip and their Total Spend.
Sales	Total sales value for the period, the order count and the average order value. This includes wallet credit spent at checkout, not just card takings. A split bar shows revenue from New versus Returning customers. Links to Orders.
Pending Orders	Orders currently sitting in a pending state. If this climbs, review them on Orders.
Upsell	Extra revenue from Roundup (checkout round-ups) and Play Again (repeat entries), with each stream's value and order count. The Play Again figure counts full order totals, so it overstates the purely incremental lift: some customers would have replayed anyway.
Cash Liability	Total cash sitting in your customers' wallets, which is money you owe. The headline is always live. The Withdrawn and Converted to credit rows below it cover the selected period. Links to withdrawals, see Wallets & Withdrawals.

Monitoring widgets

Widget	What it shows
Activity	A live feed of orders, winners, sign-ups, refunds, instant wins, main prize wins, cash-to-credit conversions and winners' prize choices.
Payment Methods	A pie chart of how customers paid in the period (Card versus Wallet Only) with counts and percentages, plus the Decline rate.
Checkout Conversion	The share of started checkouts that were paid, measured from orders rather than carts, with Completed, Abandoned, Recoverable and Live carts now.
Prize Fulfilment	Unfulfilled physical prizes by how long the winner has waited.
Referrals	Referrals that qualified in the period (the referred customer spent enough), the Spend driven by those customers, the Rewards paid in credit, and In progress for referrals registered but not yet qualified. See Referrals.
Whale Spotting	Your ten biggest completed orders of £30 and over, whatever the selected period, with customer name, order number, value and how long ago it was placed.
Most Popular Competitions	The top five competitions by tickets sold in the period, with the price per ticket.
Next Ending Competition	The competition closing soonest, with a countdown, a percentage-sold bar and tickets sold out of the maximum. Edit Competition opens its admin edit page (only if you can edit competitions), View Competition opens the public page in a new tab.

In the Show Hidden list, two widgets appear under shorter names than their card titles: Most Popular is Most Popular Competitions, and Next Ending is Next Ending Competition.

How the dashboard keeps itself up to date

The dashboard refreshes quietly about every 45 seconds, with no spinner and no page reload. When a figure changes it pulses briefly so the movement catches your eye. The Updated time next to the period selector (on larger screens) tells you when data last arrived.

Refreshing pauses while the browser tab is in the background and resumes when you come back, so an old tab may show a stale timestamp for a moment.

Who sees the finance widgets

The Sales, Profit & Loss, Cash Liability and Payment Methods widgets only appear for team members whose role includes financial analytics access. Roles without it, for example a Shop Manager, simply do not see those cards and the rest of the dashboard works as normal. If someone on your team needs the finance view, adjust their role on the Users page.

Troubleshooting

A widget is missing. Two likely causes. First, it is hidden: click Customize, then Show Hidden (N), and restore it. Remember layouts are per browser, so a widget you hid on one machine is still visible on another. Second, it is permission-gated: Sales, Profit & Loss, Cash Liability and Payment Methods are only shown to roles with financial analytics access. If neither applies, click Reset in the customise bar to restore the default layout.

Sales does not match my card takings. The Sales card includes wallet credit spent at checkout, so it is usually higher than what your payment provider settles. For cash-only revenue use Cash Revenue on the Profit & Loss widget, or open the full revenue report via View Full Report. Cash Revenue also has card refunds subtracted, so it can be lower than a previous month's figure for the same takings. That is a correction, not an error: refunded card payments are no longer counted as money you kept. The revenue report shows the refund total on its own row so you can check the difference.

Profit & Loss says "Some prize costs not configured". One or more prizes has no cost recorded, so Total Costs and Margin are understated in every scenario. Add a cost to each prize when setting up competitions (see Competitions). The warning clears once everything in the period has a cost.

The numbers do not seem to be updating. Check the Updated time next to the period selector. The dashboard refreshes roughly every 45 seconds but pauses while the tab is in the background. Switch back to the tab and it catches up on the next cycle. If the timestamp still does not move, reload the page.

The decline rate is amber or red. An unusual share of card attempts is being refused. See Investigate a drop in checkout conversion.

The size buttons (S, L, F) are missing on a card. That card is in a row with only one column, where a width setting cannot change anything. Drag it into another row if you want to resize it.

The dashboard failed to load. Use the retry option on the error screen. If it persists, check your internet connection and sign in again, since the dashboard needs an active admin session.