When I first started working with SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC), I did what most people do – I jumped straight in. I had data, I had a business problem, and I figured the tool would guide me through the rest.

I was wrong.

I recently built a multi-page monitoring dashboard in SAC to help a team track data quality and integrity across multiple source systems. By the time it was live, I had made (and thankfully fixed) every single mistake on this list. Some of them cost me hours. One cost me a full rebuild.

Here are the 5 things I wish someone had told me before I started – shared with the hope that your journey is a little smoother than mine was.

The first version of my story opened with a table. It had every metric, every row, every column. It was complete. It was accurate. And absolutely nobody read it.

The turning point came when I stopped thinking like a data person and started thinking like my audience. I asked myself: what does this person need to understand in the first 10 seconds?

The answer was KPI tiles at the top – four bold numbers that immediately answered the most important questions. Everything else – the breakdowns, the trends, the category analysis – came below, for those who wanted to dig deeper.

Lesson: Lead with the “so what”. Give your audience a landing pad before asking them to explore.

In SAC, numeric point charts with dynamic threshold coloring are your best tool for KPI tiles. Set conditional coloring so tiles automatically turn green, amber, or red – your audience should never have to read a number to know whether something needs attention.

I used donut charts throughout my dashboard, and when used correctly they are brilliant. But in my early builds I used them for everything, and that is when things got confusing.

Donut charts do exactly one job well: showing a part-to-whole split with 2 to 3 segments. In my case, each donut answered a simple binary question – complete or missing? Two segments. Clean and readable.

Lesson: Choose your chart type based on the question you are answering, not the data you happen to have.

My dashboard covers several different areas across multiple pages. When I first built it, I kept adding pages whenever I thought of something new to show. By page four, even I had to think twice about where things were.

The fix was simple in principle but painful in practice: I rebuilt the page structure so that each page answered exactly one question.

Lesson: Name your pages after the question they answer, not the data they contain.

In SAC, take the time to rename each page in the navigation panel. If you cannot decide which page a chart belongs on, that is usually a sign the page structure itself needs rethinking.

This one cost me the most time – and the most frustration.

My dashboard pulls from multiple source systems into a central HANA database, and SAC connects to that. Straightforward enough, or so I thought. Midway through the build, I realised I had structured the model in a way that made certain calculated measures impossible. I had to go back, redesign the model, and rebuild a significant portion of the story from scratch.

Lesson: Before you open SAC, sketch your full data flow on paper and answer the five key questions below.

The KPI tiles in my dashboard use color coding to instantly signal status to the viewer. I set this up late in the build. That was a mistake I would not repeat.

After I adjusted some threshold values post-launch, tiles that stakeholders had already learned to read suddenly showed different colors. The underlying data had not changed, but the visual had. People were confused, and I had to spend time rebuilding trust in the dashboard.

Lesson: Agree what red, amber, and green mean with your stakeholders – before you build a single widget.

Looking back, the technical skills such as  connecting data sources, building models, writing calculated measures were the parts I picked up fastest. The harder lessons were the thinking ones:

• Who is actually reading this dashboard?
• What single question does each page answer?
• What does my data flow look like before I touch SAC?
• What does each color mean to my audience?

If you can answer those four questions clearly before you open SAC, I genuinely believe you will build something your stakeholders use every day, not just on the day you present it.

I would love to hear what caught you out when you built your first SAC story. Drop a comment below – every lesson shared here saves someone else a rebuild!

Thank you for reading, and happy building!