Cockpits and dashboards answer the questions the product already knows you ask. Explore — Business Intelligence → Explore — is where you ask your own: pick a view (Sales, Finance, Inventory, Procurement, and the rest of the governed views of 2.8), pick one to four measures, and slice them by a breakdown — revenue by customer, spend by supplier, stock value by product. Add a time dimension with a grain (day, week, month, quarter, year) and a date range, narrow things with filters, and choose how the answer is drawn: bar, line or area chart, donut, table, pivot, or a single KPI — a KPI can also compare itself with the previous period, in the flux terms of 2.10.
The preview settles as you work, and it is honest in the four ways this chapter keeps promising. A chart shows the top 25 slices with the remainder gathered as Other, so the chart always adds up to the table beneath it; the table shows the first 100 rows and says how many there really are; a question with no answer says no rows, rather than inventing zeros; and the whole preview can be exported (CSV, spreadsheet, PDF) under the same caps as every other export. Looking costs nothing and creates nothing: until you save, an exploration is a scratchpad, and leaving the page leaves no trace.
Walking a number. When a breakdown is on screen, every row offers the further breakdowns the view itself declares — from revenue by customer you can pin one customer and walk on by product, then by channel, as far as the view's declared breakdowns go. A breadcrumb above the results shows the path you took and how many rows each level held, and clicking an earlier crumb returns you to exactly that level. Each step is a fresh, governed question carrying everything you pinned along the way — nothing is re-added up from the level above — and if you change the question by hand, the walk ends and the breadcrumb goes with it. The walk also ends, and says so, where the declared breakdowns run out: Explore only ever shows aggregates, never the documents underneath a number.
Figure 2.5 — Explore. Drawing to be produced after the UI/UX pass: the Explore page mid-question — view, measures and breakdown chosen on the left, the styled preview chart and results table on the right, the freshness chip at the top.
What Explore will not offer you is as deliberate as what it will. There is no way to ask for a single document — no order numbers, no invoice identities; Explore aggregates, and the lists behind a number live one drill away, as they do from a cockpit. There is no breakdown by employee, ever: people appear in these numbers as teams and projects, not as names. And two families are permission-gated wherever they appear — cost and margin measures need the product-costs permission, and the Finance view needs the reports permission. These are not greyed out and refused at the last click; but neither are they merely hidden — the check is made again when your question is composed, so a hand-altered request meets the same wall, and if a permission is later taken away from you, it takes the numbers with it.
Three more views deserve a word. Order Lifecycle and Purchase Lifecycle follow each order from the day it was placed through approval, delivery, invoicing and payment, and answer the timing questions — how long from order to cash?, where do orders get stuck? An order that never reached a stage, or reached it before this system kept the evidence (imported history is the usual case), shows that stage as not recorded — never as zero days, and it is left out of the averages rather than dragging them down: the average is over the orders whose journey is actually known, and the view says so. The Lab view reports on the Analytics Lab itself — which experiments have run, how accurate their backtests were, and which runs are the published ones your forecasts read from.
The Platform view — for Blossom's own team only. If you run the platform (you are signed in to the Blossom company itself, with the platform analytics permission granted to your role there), Explore and Ask AI also offer the Platform view: subscriptions by status and plan, monthly recurring revenue, trials and their conversions, storage used against plan limits, and invoices overdue. It appears only inside the platform company and only with that permission — no tenant company ever sees it, in either direction: a business's own books are never part of it, and the platform's numbers are never part of a tenant's answers. Amounts are shown in the currency each subscription or invoice was billed in; figures in different currencies are never added together.
Saving a view. When an exploration earns its keep, Save view keeps it: give it a title and say who may see it. Saving needs the dashboards create permission. A saved view is a widget — it joins the gallery of 2.5 and is placed on dashboards from the builder (2.7) exactly like a shipped one, and a dashboard's global filters apply to it like any other widget: the date range narrows its own, and a branch or department filter either applies — when the view's model carries that slice — or the widget says plainly that it cannot, rather than quietly showing unfiltered numbers under a filtered label.
Three rules govern saved views:
- Private by default. A new saved view is visible to you alone. Sharing it with the whole company is a deliberate act, and it takes the dashboards update permission.
- The view carries the permission of its strictest ingredient. When you save, the system works out which family your question touches most deeply and stamps the view with it: save a margin question and the view itself requires the product-costs permission to be seen — by anyone, on any dashboard, from that moment on. Nothing about the view leaks to a colleague who lacks it: not in the builder's picker, not in the gallery, not on a dashboard you share.
- Private views never travel. A dashboard's emailed briefing (2.7) carries its company-visible widgets; a private view is left out entirely, even from a dashboard its owner receives. And saved views never appear in cockpits — a cockpit is a shipped, governed composition, and ad-hoc questions do not move in.
Looking after your views. The Saved views panel at the foot of Explore lists every view you may see. Open loads one back into the scratchpad — its exact question, restored — and Save changes updates it everywhere it is placed; Detach lets you work on a copy so a variant can be saved as a new view instead of overwriting the original. Deleting a view removes it and takes its dashboard placements with it; the dashboards simply render without it. Your own views are yours to edit and delete; a company-wide view can also be maintained by anyone holding the dashboards update permission. If the governed model itself changes — a measure is retired — a saved view that used it does not silently substitute another number: it shows its unavailable state and names the measure that is gone.