title: “The gallery dashboard”

The gallery dashboard

The dashboard is the screen that opens when gallery staff sign in. Everything on it is a live read of your own data - nothing is cached overnight, and nothing on it belongs to another gallery.

The Privacy page notice (website editors)

If your gallery saved its Privacy page before the page could describe See it on your wall, a notice at the very top of the dashboard says Your Privacy page doesn’t yet describe See it on your wall. It is shown only to people who can edit the website (Owners, Admins, and anyone given the website permission), and only until you act on it. Press Add the section to put the standard wording into your Privacy page (you can change it afterwards: in the sidebar choose Studio Site, then the Pages tab, then the Privacy card), or press Dismiss to hide the notice for good. Nothing is emailed or texted. The full details are in the Studio Website guide, under Privacy.

What is waiting (top band)

If there is work waiting for you, a row of amber cards appears first: new inquiries, sales to review, pieces not dropped off yet. Click a card to go to the queue. When nothing is waiting, the band is not there at all - a permanent row of zeroes stops being read.

Pieces not dropped off yet are answered with Received on the piece’s row in the Artwork Catalog when it arrives. An artist can also mark their own piece set to In the gallery, Art table or Members’ show from the member portal once they have dropped it off (I’ve dropped it off): it then leaves this count, and its row in the catalog reads (marked dropped off by the artist) beside the venue. If the piece is not there, Not here yet on that row sets it back to Not dropped off yet.

Two of the cards are red rather than amber, because they are not work waiting - they are things that have already gone wrong and nobody knows it:

an inquiry we could not email you about - the lead exists and nobody is waiting on it, because nobody was told;
a payment we could not match to a work - Square has taken money that no sale in CartonCrew accounts for, so no artist has been credited for it. It goes to Financial - Unmatched payments (in the sidebar, open Financial, then the Unmatched payments tab), where you record each line of the payment to its work (or the artist’s Cards or Prints line) or dismiss it. A _Layaway Payment that was not matched to a layaway is not counted here: it waits on Artwork Catalog - Layaway tab - Layaway payments to match.

Pieces not dropped off yet. A piece set to In the gallery, Art table or Members’ show reads either Not dropped off yet or At the gallery (with the date it was dropped off, where the records have one). The card counts the first kind and opens Artwork Catalog filtered to them. When a piece arrives, press Received on its row. Where a piece is shown is the artist’s choice; if you place it somewhere else, change it with Edit. Until an artist’s new piece is at the gallery, its page and card on your website say New piece - arriving at the gallery soon., so visitors do not come in to see something that is not there yet. An Online only piece says Online only instead, straight away; Online only and Somewhere else pieces have no drop-off and are never counted here. Both notes update the next time the page loads.

Headline numbers

Three tiles (two for roles that do not see sales):

Total pieces available for sale - how many pieces a buyer could buy right now, with a second line such as 9 on the floor · 3 online only. A piece counts when it is Available, not sold, not on layaway, not Not sellable (its artist’s membership has ended), and not in the recycle bin. Pieces on the floor and pieces set to Online only both count; reserved, on loan and Not for sale pieces do not. Cards and Prints lines are never counted.

Why the website can show a smaller number. Your website’s stats strip counts the pieces a visitor can buy on the website: everything on the Works page plus the pieces in any Show that is running now. A few pieces you can sell in the gallery are not on the website, so when there are any the tile adds a third line such as 2 not on the website: 1 piece by an archived artist; 1 piece by a show artist whose show is not running. The big number minus that line is the number your website shows. The line can also name pieces whose artist is hidden from the website (the artist’s Hide this artist and their work from the website box is ticked) and pieces waiting for a photo. To put a piece back on the website, restore its artist from the archive, untick that box on the artist (Artists → Edit on the artist → untick Hide this artist and their work from the website → Save changes), add its photo, or wait for its Show to open (a show artist’s piece is on the website only while its Show is running).

Arriving pieces. A piece whose Showing from month is still to come is listed on your website as Arriving but cannot be bought there until the 1st of that month. It is not “not on the website”, and it is not in the website’s number either, so when there are any the tile says so on a line of its own, such as 3 pieces on the website as Arriving, on sale from the 1st of their start month. The big number minus the “not on the website” line minus the Arriving line is the number your website shows.
Available inventory value - the value of the works on hand that are priced and available, with how many are on hand and how many are unpriced.
Today’s Sales - what has been sold today, before tax, in dollars and cents, with a second line such as In gallery $1,200.00 (3) · Online $330.50 (1). In gallery is sales at the desk and on the kiosk (and sales you record by hand); Online is orders from your website. The numbers in brackets are how many sales. Each sale counts at the price paid for the piece, after any discount and before tax. A refund made today is taken off (its before-tax amount), even when the sale was on an earlier day; a refund that failed takes nothing off. A sale reversed as recorded in error, and a past sale you typed in as a historical record, do not count. With no sales yet it reads $0.00.

What “today” means. Today is your gallery’s own date, from the time zone in Settings. At your gallery’s midnight Today’s Sales goes back to $0.00 by itself - you do not need to reload the page.

Who sees Today’s Sales. Only roles that see both the inventory value and the gallery’s sales: the Owner, Admins, Editors, Front desk and the Treasurer. A Viewer, Curator, Show manager or Calendar Manager does not see the tile at all, and the server does not send them the figures.

Keeping the two tiles live. While the dashboard is on screen and Auto refresh (top bar) is on, Total pieces available for sale and Today’s Sales update every 30 seconds, so a sale rung up at the desk shows within half a minute. When you switch to another tab or window the updates pause, and they catch up at once when you come back. With Auto refresh off, the tiles show the numbers from when the page opened; press Refresh to update them.

Top 10 artists by inventory, and Inventory by medium

Two stacked-bar lists. Blue is unsold work on hand, green is sold; each row spells out both counts and both values. The artist list is ranked by pieces (on hand plus sold, layaway pieces included), then value, then name, and shows ten.

Sold (Layaway). To see it, click Dashboard in the sidebar and look at the Top 10 artists by inventory card. If you are an Owner or Admin, or a Treasurer, the card has a third category: a piece on an open layaway shows in amber with diagonal stripes, labeled Sold (Layaway) in the legend above the bars. Hover a bar segment to see its count; each row also spells it out, for example “1 sold (layaway) · $500”. The stripes mean you can tell it apart from Sold without relying on color, in the light and the dark theme. A piece on layaway counts only there, never also in Sold. When the layaway is completed the piece moves to Sold; when it is cancelled the piece is back on sale and counts as on hand. Only your own gallery’s pieces and layaways are counted.

Every other role (an Editor or a Viewer, for example) cannot open layaways, so for them the card stays the two-category chart: a piece on layaway is counted in Sold, as before, and nothing about the layaway is shown. Inventory by medium keeps its two categories for everyone.

Published events (Event Managers)

If you manage events, a Published events card per event appears below the numbers. It lists only the events that take volunteer sign-ups: a published event with at least one shift. An opening, reception or meeting with no shifts is not listed here (it is still in Events and on your website calendar). An event whose shifts all have sign-ups closed is still listed, because it takes sign-ups - it is full or paused. A completed event is not listed either: once the date of its last shift is before today (in your gallery’s time zone) it drops off the card, and an event with a shift today stays until the day ends. An event with no dated shift uses its end date, then its event date; one with no date at all stays listed. Events are in date order, soonest first, by each event’s next shift (today or later): a month of shifts already under way sorts by its next shift, not its first, and events with the same date sort by name. Each event shows when it starts, counted from today in your gallery’s time zone: Starts today, Starts tomorrow, Starts in a number of days, or In progress / past once its first shift has gone by and later shifts remain. When no published event qualifies, the card is not shown at all.

Website - last 30 days

This card is your studio website’s traffic, measured first-party: the site sends anonymous events (a page view, a click on a medium, an artist viewed, a search) with the visitor’s country and whether they arrived on a desktop, a phone or a tablet and which browser family they used. No IP address and no visitor identity is ever stored, so there is nothing to consent to.

What is kept about the browser, exactly. Every request carries a User Agent - a long string naming the browser, its version and the device down to the model. That string is a fingerprint, and we do not keep it. The server reads it once, as the event is recorded, writes down two short words - desktop, mobile, tablet or unknown, and one of chrome, safari, firefox, edge, opera, samsung or other - and throws the string away. The database will not accept anything else in those two columns, so the raw string cannot end up there even by mistake.

What you see, from the top:

The total - visits in the last 30 days, in large type - followed by the change against the 30 days before it: +20% vs prior 30 days, or -20%, or New when the prior month had no visits at all (there is nothing to compare against, so no percentage is invented).
The trend - a 30-day line in your brand color, one point per day, shaded beneath. Quiet days sit at zero rather than leaving a gap. Hover a point to read the date and count.
Six breakdowns, each a horizontal bar chart in its own color so you learn once which is which: Popular mediums (blue), Popular artists (orange), Visitor locations (violet), Device (magenta), Searches (green) and Browsers (teal). The count is printed on every bar, longest bar first. On a phone they stack in one column; on a desktop they sit two across, which puts Device beside Visitor locations and Browsers directly underneath Device. The card never scrolls sideways.

Where there is no data, a chart is replaced by a sentence - “No visits yet in the last 30 days”, “No searches yet” - rather than an empty axis. The breakdowns fill in independently: a gallery with visits but no searches sees five charts and one sentence.

Under the card’s title, Counting since gives the date and time the figures start from: the last time the Owner or an Admin cleared the statistics, or, if they have never been cleared, the first visit still on record (visits older than 90 days are removed automatically).

Clearing the website statistics (Owner or Admin)

Before launch the card is full of your own test and preview visits. On launch day, or any time you want a fresh start, the Owner or an Admin can clear them and start counting again:

Open Dashboard in the sidebar and find the Website - last 30 days card.
Press Clear website statistics, under the card’s title, beside Counting since.
Read the warning: every website visit, click and search recorded for your gallery is deleted, and it cannot be undone. Sales, inquiries, members, pages and every other figure on the dashboard are not touched.
In the box under the warning (its label reads Type, your gallery’s name, to confirm), type the gallery’s name exactly as the label shows it (capital letters do not matter). Until it matches, Clear statistics stays grayed out. Cancel closes the panel and changes nothing.
Press Clear statistics. The message reads Website statistics cleared (N events removed). Counting starts again now., the card drops to zero and Counting since shows the moment you cleared.

New visits are counted from then on, as usual. Each clear is recorded in the audit log with who did it, when, and how many events were removed. Only the Owner and administrators (and a ChAImp support session, which answers as an administrator) see the button; staff and members do not, and the server refuses anyone else who tries.

Device and Browsers

Device answers the question most galleries are really asking: are people reading us on a phone? Each row shows the count and the share - Mobile, 6 (30%) - so you can read it without measuring a bar or seeing a color.

Some honest caveats, which the card states underneath the chart:

The shares are of the visits in the window, and the sentence under the chart says how many that is. They always add to 100%.
Unknown is shown, never hidden. Every visit recorded before this was added counts as Unknown, so the first month is mostly Unknown and the split becomes meaningful as new visits accumulate. Hiding those rows would have made every other share look bigger than it is.
Crawlers are excluded. Search-engine and AI crawlers identify themselves, and they are recorded but kept out of the device split, the browser list, the visit total and the trend - a robot is not a visitor, and including them would make the phone share look wrong. The sentence tells you how many were dropped.
An iPad reading your site in its default mode counts as a desktop. Apple made iPads send a Mac’s identification, and the only way to tell them apart is to probe the device from the page - which is fingerprinting, and we will not do it. So treat the tablet number as a floor, not a total.

If the charts do not appear

If the chart library fails to load in your browser, the card falls back to plain lists of the same numbers. You lose the trend line, not the data. Reload the page; if it persists, tell us which browser you are using.

What the colors are

The visits line uses your organization’s primary color, so a white-labeled gallery sees its own brand lead its own numbers. The breakdown colors are fixed: they were chosen to stay readable against the card in both the light and dark themes and to remain distinguishable for readers with color-vision deficiency, which a brand palette cannot promise. Every bar carries its count - and, on Device and Browsers, its share - so nothing depends on color alone.

Your name and photo: the card at the top right and My profile

The card at the top right of every admin page shows your photo (or your initials when there is none), your name, and your role underneath, such as Owner. During a ChAImp support session it says Support session instead of a role.

If the support session ends while a page is open, the next thing support clicks shows Your support access to this gallery has ended, with Go to the ChAImp Portal and Sign in. Nothing more can be viewed or saved on that page; support requests access again from the ChAImp Portal to continue.

Your name is the name you are shown under everywhere in your organization: this card, Recent Activity, notes and the people lists. To change it, click the card, then My profile, type the name in Display name and press Save name. The card updates straight away; you do not need to sign out. Owners and Admins can also change anyone’s name in Settings → Organization → Users, on that person’s row.
Your photo: to add your own, click the card, then My profile, then Upload photo under Your photo, and choose a PNG, JPG or WebP image under 10 MB. It is shown on your card in every gallery you work in. Once one is set the buttons read Change photo and Remove photo. Only you can set or remove it; Owners and Admins cannot change it for you.
Which photo the card shows, in order: the photo you uploaded on My profile; otherwise the photo on your artist profile in this gallery when you are also a member artist (change that in the Artist Portal under My Profile); otherwise the picture from the account you sign in with (such as Google). With none of these, your initials are shown. Remove photo takes your uploaded photo away and the card goes back down this list.

Keeping any page up to date: Refresh and Auto refresh

These two controls sit in the top bar of every admin page, to the left of the theme button and your name. They work the same on the dashboard and on every other screen (Artwork, Sales, Layaways, Calendar, Classes, Artists and the rest).

Refresh reloads the information on the page you are on, without reloading the browser. You stay signed in, on the same page and the same tab, so there is no need to press F5. On a phone the button shows as the circular arrow only.
Auto refresh is a switch, off to start with. While a page is open the app checks once a minute whether anything in your gallery has changed - new or changed works, sales, layaways and layaway payments, shifts and shift sign-ups, classes and class bookings, and members. It only checks while the tab is on screen, and checks at once when you come back to it.

When something has changed, what happens depends on the switch:

Off: a bar appears at the top of the page, for example “Updated since this page loaded: 2 new sales.” Click Refresh on the bar to see the new information.
On: the page refreshes by itself. It never does this while you are typing into a form you have not saved yet, or while a dialog is open - in those cases the bar appears instead, so nothing you have typed is lost.

Your Auto refresh choice is remembered for you on that computer or tablet; someone else signing in on the same device starts with it off. Changes you save yourself are not reported back to you as news. Owners and Admins see what changed in words; other roles see a plain “something in the gallery changed”. Only your own gallery is ever checked. The artists’ Member Portal has neither control.

Changing what a role can do (Owner)

Settings -> Roles (this tab used to be called Permissions) lists your gallery’s roles. Open one to see “A Treasurer can:” in plain sentences, and who has the role. Only the gallery Owner (and ChAImp support during a support session) can change a role. An Admin sees the tab read-only, with “Only the gallery owner can change what a role can do.”

In the sidebar, click Settings, then the Roles tab.
Click the role.
Flip the switch beside a sentence, and confirm the change For everyone who is in that role.

Changes are saved now and take effect when the new roles switch on for that part of CartonCrew, in a later release. Until then each built-in role works the way it does today.

New role makes a role in four short steps: its name, which role it Starts like, which built-in role its people work like until the new roles switch on, and a yes or no for each sentence. Click Create role at the end.
Hide this role stops it being offered to anyone new; people who have it keep it. Delete this role removes a role nobody has (a deactivated person or a waiting invitation counts).
The Owner role can never be changed, hidden or deleted.
Advanced, at the bottom of a role page, opens the full grid. It is there mainly for ChAImp support.

To change what one person can do, use their person page instead: on Settings -> Organization -> Users, click the “What John can do” button on their row (it carries their first name). An Owner or an Admin can switch things Just for that person there, and give them any role with Change.

Letting ChAImp support view member portals (Owner and Admin)

At the top of Settings -> Roles, ChAImp support and member portals decides whether ChAImp support may use View as this member while they help your gallery in a support session. It is off for every gallery until an Owner or Admin turns it on.

In the sidebar, click Settings, then the Roles tab.
In ChAImp support and member portals, tick Allow ChAImp support to view member portals to turn it on, or clear the tick to turn it off.
Click Save.

When it is on, ChAImp support sees View as this member on Artists, Edit during a support session at your gallery, with the same limits as your staff: read-only, 30 minutes at most, your gallery’s members only, never the Owner, and recorded. The member is told that ChAImp support viewed their portal. Turning it off, or the support session ending, ends any view they have open at once. Only an Owner or Admin can change it (ChAImp support can see it but not change it), and every change is recorded.

What’s new in CartonCrew (Settings -> About)

To see what has changed lately, click Settings in the sidebar, then the About tab, and expand What’s new. It lists the Studio highlights - what your gallery can now see or do - newest month first, with the current month open.

Inside a month, each day has one heading, for example “Saturday, October 10 (5)”, and the number is how many highlights that day holds. Click a day to open it: inside are that day’s releases, each its own heading with its version, for example “v1.885.0 (3)”; click a version to see that release’s highlights. The latest day is on top and, within a day, the latest version, so when two releases arrive on the same day the newer one comes first. A few older highlights have no version and show directly under their day, after that day’s releases. The version is the same number as the Build line on that tab, so you can tell at a glance whether a highlight is in the build you are running.

Tick Show all details to list every highlight with its day and version, or type a word in Search what’s new to find one.