Start from the CSV
This guide uses a handful of the sample's columns: employee_id, role, department, level, location, salary, market_band.
Template examples
How to design your Salary Benchmarking dashboard, widget by widget.
Compensation dashboards lean on averages and one comparison matrix - average by level, by role, by location. Here’s how those cards come together, built using the real Salary Benchmarking template.
The building blocks
Five widget types cover almost every dashboard. Each one needs a specific shape of column.
KPIOne numeric column, summed, averaged, or counted
salary → Average SalaryChartA date or category column, plus a measure
role + salary → by roleMatrixTwo category columns and one measure
role + location + salaryRankingA category column and a measure, ranked
department + salary → top departmentsDetail tableWhichever columns people need to inspect
all 12 columns, sortable and filterableTwo ways to build every widget
Point and click
Add widget → pick a type → fill in Title, Value column, Calculation, and Format → Review → Add widget. Three steps, and every field has a default to start from.
Describe it
Type what you want in plain English. This is the faster path for anything the point-and-click form doesn't have a field for yet - like a second, smaller comparison number on a KPI.
Worked example: Salary Benchmarking
Average a numeric column: Average Salary
Add widget → KPI. Value column: salary. Calculation: avg. Format: currency.
A different calculation on the same column: Highest Salary
Add widget → KPI. Value column: salary again - but Calculation: max instead of avg. Same column, different question.
Rank departments by pay
Add widget → Ranking. Rank by: department. Value: salary. Calculation: avg. Format: currency. Show top: 5.
Compare role and location together
Add widget → Matrix. Rows: role. Columns: location. Value: salary. Calculation: avg. Format: currency. Shown here for 3 of the 5 roles - a dash means this dataset had no rows for that combination.
Common mistakes to avoid
- Only numbers add up.Sum, average, and max work on numeric columns only - role, location, and level can be counted or grouped, not averaged.
- Format doesn’t follow automatically.Choosing "avg" doesn’t switch the card to currency by itself. "Average Salary" needed Format set to currency explicitly, or it shows as a bare number.
- Count adds up rows, not a column."Above Band" isn’t a count of the market_band column - it’s a count of rows where market_band is Above band.
See it built