Tessitura Data Into Dashboards: The Complete Workflow

At the League of American Orchestras conference, at INTIX, at TLCC, whenever I show a dashboard, I get the same question: how are you doing this with Tessitura?

I get the impression people think it’s either not possible or requires some technical wizardry I’m not sharing. It’s not. It’s a workflow anyone can build, and the hardest part is just starting.

Here’s the complete picture of how I do it.

Start With the Right Data Extract

Everything begins with getting data out of Tessitura in a usable format. In Tessitura, I use Analytics to build a table with every column I could possibly want, and I go as granular as I possibly can, as long as it’s relevant data.

For a ticket sales dashboard, that table might include: fiscal year, season type, season, production, performance, performance date, performance time, venue, paid tickets, comp tickets, total revenue, revenue budget, scanned attendance. I think about it in a tabular format, row by row, what are you looking at, and what do you want to know about it?

Then I export it as Excel or CSV. That file is the foundation everything else builds on.

Two Paths Forward

From there, you have two main options. Both work. One is more accessible; one scales better.

Path 1: Excel Dashboards

If you have Excel, you can do this. No additional tools required.

Take your raw data export and convert it into a named Excel table (this makes it easier to update later). Add a new tab, build a pivot table pointing to that table, and select the fields you want to analyze. Add another tab for your dashboard view and pull in pivot charts connected to those pivot tables.

The charts are dynamic, when you refresh the data, the charts update. You can add slicers (filters) to make the dashboard interactive. With some formatting attention, these can look genuinely polished.

For years, this was exactly what I did. It works. The BSO ran on Excel dashboards built this way, and they served us well.

If you want to learn this well, I’d point you to the YouTube channel My Online Training Hub, she is the definitive resource for building beautiful dashboards in Excel.

Path 2: Power BI

Excel dashboards have limits. Updating required a lot of copying and pasting. Managing multiple data extracts across many dashboards became unwieldy. I wanted a system where I could save a file to a folder and have the dashboard sync automatically.

Power BI solved that. It’s available within the Microsoft ecosystem, there’s a free version that comes with your business suite. The only license I needed to pay for ($8/month) was to publish dashboards to the web. People accessing those dashboards don’t need licenses. All they need is a URL.

The setup is simple: download the Power BI app, connect it to your Excel or CSV file, and start building. The biggest advantage over Excel, beyond the better chart tools, is that you can pull from multiple files into the same dashboard and create relationships between them. That let me consolidate ticketing dashboards, contribution dashboards, audience demographics, and finance reporting into a unified system.

I learned Power BI entirely from YouTube, I’d specifically recommend the channel How to Power BI for getting started.

The Sharing Problem This Solves

The reason I built this workflow is straightforward: only Tessitura users can access Tessitura Analytics dashboards. In most organizations, that’s a small fraction of the people who actually need the data, board members, executives, marketing leadership, finance.

Power BI with web publishing fixes that. Share a URL, they see the dashboard. No license, no login, no friction.

Start Simple

You’re not going to go from nothing to a six-page polished dashboard overnight. That takes time. But it really just starts with that first file, that first tool, that first chart.

Once you understand how the data flows, extract, connect, visualize, the rest is iteration. Build something, share it, get feedback, add to it. The organizations I’ve seen struggle with this are the ones waiting until they have a perfect plan before they start. The ones who have made progress just started somewhere.

If you have Tessitura and you have Excel, you have everything you need to build your first dashboard today.