Who gets to see what in your report?

A dashboard only gets used when people see what concerns them. A branch manager who only sees the company total drops out within two weeks.

At the same time, not everyone should see everything. And the question of who gets to see what usually only gets asked after it has gone wrong once.

Roles, not people

Set access per role, not per name. The owner sees everything. A branch manager sees their own store. A salesperson sees their own customers.

When someone joins, they get a role and it is sorted. When someone leaves, the role goes with them and nothing gets forgotten.

In Power BI this is called row-level security. Everyone opens the same report, but each role only sees the rows that belong to it. That is also easier to maintain: you manage one report instead of five copies that slowly drift apart.

What is sensitive

Four kinds of numbers deserve extra care. Pay per person and absence per person, for privacy reasons. Margin per customer and purchase prices, because they are commercially sensitive: a salesperson who knows what you pay for an item negotiates differently.

There is a tension in that. The counter of a collective bonus plan is something you want everyone to see, otherwise it steers nothing. The payroll behind it, not. The rule is simple: collective can be visible, individual cannot.

Branches against each other

In my stores, the figures per branch were shared with all branches. That sometimes creates extra motivation: a team that sees another store doing better does not want to fall behind.

But it also brings jealousy. And that usually does not arise because a team works badly, but because the comparison is not fair. A store in a prime location and a store in a side street run in completely different circumstances. Put their revenue side by side and you get a ranking of locations, not of teams.

So sharing can work, but share what is comparable. Each branch's development against itself. Conversion instead of revenue. Figures per visitor instead of absolute amounts. Then the comparison is about what a team has in its own hands, and it motivates without chafing.

Where it leaks

Rarely in the report itself. Usually next to it.

Someone exports to Excel and forwards it. That export respects the role at the moment it is made, but after that no rules apply to the file. Someone pastes a screenshot into a group chat. Someone shares a link with "everyone in the organization" because that was quicker.

So limit export on the pages with sensitive numbers. And agree on what may happen with shared figures, because technology does not solve that part.

How to test it

Look at the report as each role before you roll it out. Power BI has a feature for that. Does the salesperson see no colleague's customers? Do the totals add up per role? And does someone without a role see nothing, instead of everything?

Watch out for one trap many people do not know about: anyone with edit rights in the workspace sees everything, even when roles are set up. Roles apply to viewers. So do not give edit rights to anyone who only needs to look.

The claim

Access is not an IT setting but a decision about who needs to know what. Whoever does not make that decision leaves it to the first person who clicks share.