AureaDesk: why we built our own dashboard for TOPdesk

Almost every TOPdesk environment we take over has the same reporting habit: once a month somebody exports to Excel, pastes in some charts and circulates a PDF. Three people open it, at the monthly review it is already two weeks old, and the question "how are we doing right now?" stays unanswered.

That is where AureaDesk came from — not as a product we set out to build, but because we needed it ourselves to account for the administration we do. This article sets out what it is, what it is not, and when it is worth it.

What the problem actually is

TOPdesk has reports. The problem is not that figures are missing, but that they stand apart from one another. The number of open tickets says little without the trend. Resolution time says little without knowing which team is pulling it up. And a change made last week only turns out to relate to this week's failures once you put the two side by side.

The usual answer is a BI project: Power BI or Qlik on top, data models built, licences bought. That works, but it is a heavy instrument for making your own service desk legible. And it produces a second system needing maintenance from the same people who were already short of time.

What AureaDesk does

AureaDesk reads six modules through the TOPdesk API and presents them in eight views, plus an overview screen that summarises them. It runs on its own subdomain per client; you sign in with a browser, there is no app and no BI licence.

• Ticket management — intake, SLA compliance per priority, resolution time, longest waiting and first-line resolution, with a forecast from seven days to twelve months.
• Change management — changes and their underlying activities in one view.
• Operations management — the work that is neither ticket nor change, but still costs capacity.
• Asset management — per asset the number of tickets and changes, and their order in time.
• Knowledge base — knowledge items by status and visibility, flagging items that are visible but have not been updated for ninety days.
• Workload — the load per team and per agent, composed from several modules.

One filter — period, department, team, agent — carries across every view. That sounds like a detail, but it is exactly where home-built reporting comes apart: you can filter, but only within that one report.

The view that surprises people most

In practice that is asset management. Not because of the counts, but because of the chronology: per asset you see tickets and changes in order of time. That makes it visible whether failures appeared shortly after a change. Everyone suspects that link occasionally; demonstrating it used to cost an afternoon of exporting.

What it is not

It does not replace TOPdesk reports. For a specific, one-off question a report inside TOPdesk is often quicker. AureaDesk is for the questions that come back every month.

It is not a BI platform. You cannot build your own data model in it or connect external sources. That is a deliberate limit: the moment you can, you are back in the project you were trying to avoid.

It does not fix poor registration. If tickets have sat in the wrong category for years, a dashboard shows that neatly — and nothing more. Often that is the first return, mind you: you finally see how far off it is.

When it pays off

The sum is simple. If producing your monthly report costs two to four hours, that is easily thirty hours a year. Add the time spent on one-off questions: how many tickets did department X have last quarter, what was the resolution time for team Y.

So it pays off sooner at organisations where somebody actually produces that reporting than at organisations where nobody asks for it. In the second case the honest answer is that you are better off deciding first what you want to steer on — and only then switching a dashboard on.

How it fits with us

Every one of our administration packages includes the AureaDesk Pro package, worth €395 a month. That is not a sweetener: we use it ourselves for the monthly report and the SLA and XLA accounting. Without a dashboard that accounting becomes manual work, and hours go into something that could have been automatic.

If you do not take administration from us, AureaDesk is available separately. At aureadesk.com you will find the packages with current pricing, the views with screenshots, and you can request a free demo: your own environment with sample data, without connecting anything.