Timeline events

A jump or a dip in a chart is much easier to read when you know what happened at the time. Timeline events are short, dated notes for the big things that happened to your business: a price increase, new or retired plans, a move to another billing system, a big campaign. Each one shows as a flag on every report chart with dates, for everyone on your account, so the chart explains itself months later. The dashboard's widgets leave them out, so the same flags don't repeat on every card.

Add a timeline event

There are two ways in:

• From any chart: open the chart's ⋯ menu and pick Add timeline event…
• From Settings › Timeline: click Add timeline event.

Fill in:

• Date – the day it happened.
• What happened – a short title, up to 80 characters. For example "Price increase on Pro" or "Moved billing from Chargebee to Stripe".
• Why, or more detail (optional) – up to 1,000 characters. For example "We dropped the weakest markets, so fewer trials but better ones."

Admins and owners can add, edit and delete timeline events. Everyone else on the account, read-only users included, sees them on the charts.

On the charts

• Each event is a flag above the chart with a dashed line down to the day it happened. The line sits at the exact day, between the points around it: on a monthly chart, where each point is the end of its month, an event on 3 February appears just after the January point.
• Hover a flag to read the event in full. Admins and owners get a pencil button to edit it.
• Events close together on the chart share one flag with a count. Hover it to see them all.
• When you hover a period, its tooltip lists the events that happened in it.

To hide the flags, turn off Timeline events in a chart's ⋯ menu. That hides them on every report chart, and GrowPanel remembers the choice in your browser. Turn the switch back on to show them again.

Settings › Timeline

Settings › Timeline lists all your timeline events, newest first. Admins and owners can add new ones and edit or delete existing ones there.

Above the list, GrowPanel suggests events it can see in your data. For example, if you have more than one data source, the day billing started in each new one. Click + Add to put a suggestion on your timeline, or the cross to hide it for good. Suggestions are never added on their own.

Timeline events and GrowPanel AI

GrowPanel AI knows your timeline events. When you ask why a number moved and the change lines up with one of them, it names your event as the likely reason instead of guessing.

What belongs on the timeline

Keep it to the big things, the ones you'd want to remember when you look at a chart a year from now:

• Price changes
• New, changed or retired plans
• A move to another billing system, or a second one
• Big marketing campaigns, or an ad channel you started or stopped
• Product launches and major releases
• Markets you started or stopped selling in

Small day-to-day changes make the charts busy and the big events harder to spot.