A fake sales dashboard for a video: choosing it and setting it up

Start with who’s looking at it

“Sales dashboard” means different screens to different people, and a viewer who has done the job will know which one belongs in your character’s hand.

• A store owner watches today’s sales, orders, visitors and the list of new orders. That’s an ecommerce dashboard.
• A sales team watches deals, pipeline and quota, usually on a laptop or a screen on the wall.
• A subscription business watches recurring revenue, sign-ups and cancellations.
• A restaurant or a shop floor watches tickets, covers and the till.

Pozer’s store dashboard is the first of those. Its labels are fixed — Total sales, Sessions, Total orders, Conversion rate and Average order value on Home, with tabs for Orders, Products and a Menu — so it suits any character who sells products online, from a student with a side shop to a brand having a record week. It isn’t the right screen for a sales floor or a subscription start-up: the labels would be wrong, and a design tool will serve you better. Pozer’s other templates cover a few more kinds of screen, such as creator analytics and a payment app.

It’s also a phone screen. Counter, as the template is called, is laid out for a phone in someone’s hand, so it can’t stand in for a sales dashboard on a laptop or on a monitor on the office wall either.

Size the numbers to the character

A viewer reads a dashboard as a portrait of whoever owns it, so the scale of the numbers has to match the character before it matches anything else. Here are three stores, each consistent with itself, each a different person:

• A student’s side shop. $412.80 from 9 orders and 530 sessions, which makes an average order of $45.87 and a conversion rate of 1.7%, with 4 visitors right now. Small, but it says the thing works.
• A brand that’s taking off. $8,934.15 from 163 orders and 6,120 sessions: $54.81 an order, 2.7% conversion, 96 visitors right now.
• An established store. The template’s own defaults: $68,420.50 from 1,284 orders and 26,743 sessions, $53.29 an order, 4.8% conversion, 342 visitors right now. A store taking over a thousand orders a day has been numbering them for a long time, so give it a Latest order number in six figures, not four.

Between them, keep the average order tied to what the character actually sells, and let the store’s age show in its order numbers: a shop that opened last month has low ones.

Prop, illustration, or claim

A dashboard in a scene is a prop. In the B-roll of an explainer it’s an illustration, and it’s worth saying so on screen or in the voiceover. What it can’t be is a claim: shown as your real results, or anyone’s — to sell a course or a method, to win a sponsor, to raise money — it stops being a prop and becomes fraud, and our acceptable use policy prohibits it.

What reads at each distance

Decide how close the camera gets before you decide the numbers, because that decides which numbers anyone will see.

• Wide. Only the brightness of the screen and the shape of the chart. The default white sheet reads as a bright rectangle under a dark header; switch Background to a dark colour if the phone needs to sit quietly in a night scene.
• Medium, over the shoulder. The selected figure — total sales, to start with — and the change under it. The figure is the biggest type on Home, and the change carries its meaning in colour: green with ↗ when it’s up, red with ↘ when it’s down.
• Close-up. Everything — the row of figures, the task cards, whichever tab is open. This is where the figures have to agree with each other, and where the guide to filming the dashboard earns its keep.

That colour is the quickest way to set the mood of a scene. A store owner having a bad day needs negative changes: at −23.5, the total reads ↘ 23.5% in red. Take Sessions change % and Orders change % below zero too — −18.2 and −21.7 here — or the row will show traffic and orders up on the day sales fell; with them, conversion and average order value come out ↘ 4.3% and ↘ 2.3%.

Keep the numbers straight across scenes

If the dashboard appears more than once — day one and day ninety, before the launch and after it — treat its numbers the way a script supervisor treats continuity. Keep a sheet with a line per scene: the time of day, total sales, orders, sessions, visitors right now, the change, the latest order number and the orders in the list. Then check the joins.

• Order numbers only go up. A later scene’s Latest order number should be higher than an earlier one’s by at least the orders taken in between.
• Today resets. The headline is today’s total — the field is Total sales today — so a scene set the next morning starts lower than the night before, not higher.
• The week and month follow today. Last 7 days and Last 30 days are calculated from today’s figures, so if a scene taps them, they move whenever you change today.
• The same store looks the same. Store name, logo, chart-line colour, background and currency stay put between scenes unless the story changes them.
• Dialogue matches the screen. If a character says the number, write the line from the sheet. People round when they talk, so “sixty-eight grand” over $68,420.50 is fine; “we doubled yesterday” over a screen reading ↗ 38.2% is the kind of mismatch someone always catches.

Between scenes, change the figures with the app’s Edit button, which the installed app keeps out of sight until you hold two fingers still on the screen; on iPhone, the first time, the same hold asks you to sign in instead. Edit opens every field, the Sales by hour bars included, on the figures as you last published them, and Save changes makes the new ones the app’s starting point.

Match the hour

A dashboard carries the time of day in three places. The Today chart always runs from 12 AM to 11 PM, drawn right across, so it reads most naturally late in the day; in a morning scene, keep the chart out of the close-up rather than show sales the day hasn’t had yet. Visitors right now should rise and fall with the hour too, at whatever scale the store runs. And the times on the Orders tab are text you type, so they can say whatever the scene needs: a rush of orders minutes apart for a busy evening, gaps of an hour or more for a slow one. The defaults already agree with the chart: they run from Today at 8:31 PM to Today at 9:41 PM, in the evening peak.

Match the place

Currency offers US dollars, euros, pounds and Indonesian rupiah. It changes the symbol and nothing else — no figure is converted — so a scene set in Jakarta needs every number retyped in rupiah, the orders included. A strong day there might read Rp1,084,512,750.00 from 3,104 orders, which puts the average order at Rp349,391.99 — so the orders on the Orders tab should sit around Rp349,000, not at dollar-sized amounts with a new symbol in front.

Figures are always written the English way, with commas for thousands and a point for decimals. In much of Europe and in Indonesia the two swap places, so in a scene set there, keep the close-ups short. Name the store for the place and the character, and pick a chart-line colour that suits the production’s palette. Pozer supplies no logos: leave Store logo empty and a letter tile stands in, or upload artwork of your own. An invented store name keeps somebody else’s brand out of your frame — one less thing to clear.

On set

• Give the actor the controls that work. The Today pill, the row of figures, the four tabs, the orders and Fulfill items all respond, and Home pulls down to refresh. The search and assistant buttons, Report, the filter chips, the task cards and the Menu rows don’t, so block the action around what works.
• Film the installed app. Opened from its home-screen icon it runs fullscreen, and on the owner’s phone it keeps the Edit button hidden until someone holds two fingers still on the screen; in a browser tab the button stays in view.
• Check it before every setup. Compare it with the sheet, and put it back on Home at Today: the range, the charted figure, the open tab and any order marked fulfilled stay as the last take left them for as long as the app is open.

When the scene is a store owner and the camera gets close, this is the screen we built for it. Start with the template, set the figures from your sheet, and install it on the phone you’ll film.