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Immediate Value

After this tutorial, you’ll create a dashboard view from a template, build your own tiles, report on team activity, bring several lists onto one dashboard, and export or schedule dashboards for people who never open Affinity.

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Prerequisites

  • Tutorial 1: Your First List (with populated data)
  • Tutorial 5: Pipeline Basics
  • Scale, Advanced, or Enterprise — Affinity Analytics isn’t on the Essential plan.
  • The Creator role to build dashboards. Admins are Creators by default; Standard users are Viewers, who can use, filter, and export dashboards but not create or edit them.

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Quick-Start Roadmap

  1. Find Affinity Analytics — it lives in your lists
  2. Create a dashboard view from a template
  3. Build your first tile
  4. Pick the right visualization
  5. Report on team activity
  6. Bring several lists onto one dashboard
  7. Export and schedule
New Lists is the default Lists experience for every customer. A few features still need Classic Lists — where one comes up, this tutorial says so. To switch a single list, see Switching between New and Classic Lists.

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Why Analytics Matter

Affinity Analytics turns CRM data into dashboards and reports. Use it for pipeline health, team activity, funnel conversion, and forecasting reports that go to partners, LPs, and boards.
Affinity guide: Analytics Guide — Getting Started and Affinity Analytics Masterclass.

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Task 1: Find Affinity Analytics — It Lives in Your Lists

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Context

Affinity Analytics isn’t a separate section of the app. Each dashboard is a dashboard view inside a list, sitting alongside that list’s sheet and board views.

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🎬 Watch

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Action

  1. Open the list you want to report on.
  2. Look along the view tabs above the column headers. Any dashboard views your team has built appear there — click one to open it.
  3. As a Viewer, you can filter, drill into the data behind a tile, rename, and export. As a Creator, you can also create and edit dashboards.

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Expected Outcome

You know where dashboards live and what your role lets you do with them.

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📚 Help Center

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Task 2: Create a Dashboard View from a Template

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Context

Templates are the fastest start. Affinity provides four, and each builds a ready-made dashboard from the list you’re in.

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Action

  1. In your list, click the + at the end of the view tabs and choose Dashboard View.
  2. Pick a template:
    • List Summary — an overview of what’s in the list
    • Team Activity — emails, meetings, and logged interactions
    • Funnel Analysis — how records move through your stages, including average time in each
    • Introductions Summary — where your introductions come from
  3. The dashboard view is created with tiles already populated from the list’s data.
If you don’t see Dashboard View, you’re a Viewer rather than a Creator. Ask an admin to create the dashboard for you, or to request the Creator role for you through support.
Templates are starting points. Add or remove tiles to match what your team actually reviews.

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Expected Outcome

You have a dashboard view in your list, populated with your data.

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📚 Help Center

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Task 3: Build Your First Tile

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Context

Tiles are the building blocks of a dashboard. A visualization tile combines dimensions (the fields you group by, such as Status or Owners) with measures (how you count them, such as Count or Average).

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Action

  1. Open your dashboard view and click Edit Dashboard (or the ⋯ menu → Edit dashboard).
  2. Click Add Tile → Visualization.
  3. Select the list the tile should draw from, and name the tile — for example, Deals by Stage.
  4. On the All Fields tab, choose your dimensions and measures, then click Run to see the data.
  5. Add filters if you want to focus on specific values, and click Run again.
  6. Click Save.
Start with 2–3 tiles. Add more only once you’ve confirmed the dashboard is something you check regularly. Text tiles make good section headers once a dashboard grows.

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Expected Outcome

Your dashboard has a tile showing a metric you built yourself.

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📚 Help Center

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Task 4: Pick the Right Visualization

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Context

The same data can answer different questions depending on how it’s drawn.

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Action

After clicking Run on a tile, choose how to display it:
  • Single value — one number, such as total pipeline value
  • Column or bar — comparisons, such as deals per stage
  • Line or area — trends over time, such as monthly deal flow
  • Pie — distribution, such as deals by industry
  • Table — detail, such as the top 10 deals by amount
  • Scatterplot and map — relationships between two measures, and geography
To change a tile later, go back into Edit Dashboard and use the ⋯ menu on the tile.

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Expected Outcome

Each tile uses the visualization that answers its question at a glance.

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Task 5: Report on Team Activity

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Context

Team activity reporting shows who is engaging with whom — synced emails, synced meetings, and logged interactions — broken down by stage, industry, or pipeline status. Useful for stand-ups and pipeline reviews.

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Action

  1. In the list you want to report on, click + → Dashboard View → Team Activity.
  2. Review the tiles for synced emails, synced meetings, and logged interactions.
  3. Use the dashboard filters to narrow the time period or focus on particular team members.

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Expected Outcome

You have a per-person activity view across key activities.

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📚 Help Center

Basic Reporting (the Reports tab) is a legacy feature that isn’t available to new customers. If your firm still has it, Affinity Analytics is the recommended replacement.

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Task 6: Bring Several Lists onto One Dashboard

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Context

A dashboard view sits in one list, but each tile chooses its own list when you create it. That lets you put your deal pipeline, your LP list, and your portfolio side by side for a single review.

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Action

  1. Open Edit Dashboard and click Add Tile → Visualization.
  2. When asked which list the tile should draw from, pick a different list from the one the dashboard lives in.
  3. Build and save the tile as in Task 3. Repeat for each list you want on the dashboard.
Each tile reads from one list. To compare lists, put their tiles next to each other rather than expecting a single tile to add them together.

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Expected Outcome

One dashboard gives you a view across several lists.

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Task 7: Export and Schedule

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Context

Most people who need your numbers will never open Affinity. Dashboards can be downloaded once, or delivered by email on a schedule.

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Action

Download a dashboard:
  1. On the dashboard view, click the ⋯ menu → Download.
  2. Choose PDF (the visuals as they appear) or CSV (one file of values per tile).
Schedule it by email:
  1. Click the ⋯ menu → Schedule delivery.
  2. Choose the Recurrence and Time (times are in Pacific Time).
  3. Add the email addresses to send to, and pick PDF, PNG, or CSV.
  4. Click Save.
Creators can send dashboards to any email address. Viewers can only send them to themselves.
Export list data: in the list itself, export the current view to CSV — filters and sorts included.

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Expected Outcome

You can hand anyone a current copy of a dashboard, once or on a schedule, and export list data for a spreadsheet.

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📚 Help Center

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Bonus: AI Chat for Analytics Questions

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Context

AI Chat lets you ask natural-language questions about your CRM data — e.g., “What’s our pipeline value this quarter?” or “How many deals did the team source last month?” It can surface answers without building a report manually.

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Action

  1. Open AI Chat from the left navigation, or press Cmd+J (Mac) / Alt+J (Windows). It’s available on Scale, Advanced and Enterprise; if you can’t see it, an admin enables Affinity AI at Settings → Automations & AI → Affinity AI.
  2. Type a natural-language question about your data.
  3. Review the answer and the cited data source.
Always verify the underlying data by clicking through to the source list or report before sharing externally. Activity history reaches back about 90 days, so very long-range questions may be truncated.
Other ways to report. On Advanced and Enterprise, Databricks Data Share (a paid add-on, in beta) gives your data team read-only access to your Affinity data in your own Databricks workspace. And with Affinity MCP, you can turn a pipeline list into charts for a partner meeting in plain language — see On-demand pipeline dashboards and reports.

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Expected Outcome

You know AI Chat exists and how to use it to ask quick analytics questions.

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Common Questions

Once you have enough entries across your lists and a few weeks of activity data. Before that, there’s not enough data for the metrics to mean much.
Affinity Analytics refreshes its underlying data every 20–40 minutes, so a change you just made may take a little while to appear.
Yes. On any dashboard view, click ⋯ → Schedule delivery and choose a recurrence, a time (Pacific Time), the recipients, and PDF, PNG, or CSV. See Task 7.
Yes, as files. Download the dashboard as a PDF or CSV, or schedule it to arrive by email — Creators can send to any address. Viewing the live dashboard itself requires an Affinity login.

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See It In Action

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Where to Go Next