Reading the dashboard

When your scan completes, the wizard hands off to the dashboard. This is the workspace you will spend most of your time in: a heatmap of where regulatory activity is concentrated, a written briefing from the analysis, a timeline of what is coming up, trend cards, the underlying evidence, and a Studio for turning any of it into a deliverable.

You do not need to absorb everything at once. Most people land on the heatmap, scan for the hot cells, click into one to read the items, then jump to the briefing for the written read of what is happening. The other tabs are there when you want to go deeper — or when a colleague asks a question the heatmap can’t answer.

This page is a map of the layout. Each section below covers one view in depth.

Why this matters

A scan returns dozens to hundreds of regulatory items. Looking at a raw list is not useful — you can’t see the shape of the picture. The dashboard exists to compress that list five different ways: by severity (heatmap), by date (timeline), by pattern (trends), by editorial summary (executive narrative), and by underlying evidence (sources). Each view answers a different question. Knowing which one to open is half the value.

The layout

Across the top of the dashboard is the tab bar. The tabs you will see, when there is data for them:

• Overview — the heatmap. The default landing tab.
• Briefing — the editorial executive narrative. Appears when the scan produced one (most do).
• Trends — typed trend cards (convergence, divergence, emerging, acceleration, interconnected).
• Timeline — a horizontal Gantt-style swimlane of upcoming dates.
• Map — the same severity scoring as the heatmap, projected onto a world map.
• Sources — every URL the research cited.
• Studio — the export gallery: tearsheets, infographics, audio briefings, slide decks, PDFs.
• My Snapshots — your saved scans.
• Scheduled Scans — recurring runs, if you have set any up.

Down the left is the filter sidebar. Toggling impact, likelihood, or status here changes what the heatmap, timeline, map, and detail panel show. The sidebar can be pinned open or collapsed to a thin strip.

In the top-right corner of the chrome:

• Language picker — switch the dashboard between languages the scan was translated into.
• Export menu — quick JSON / CSV downloads. The richer surface for branded exports is Studio.
• Account menu — your sign-in, language preference, and sign-out.

How the views fit together

Think of the dashboard as a single dataset shown five ways. The same items feed every view. Filters apply globally. Language switches globally. Click a heatmap cell, a country on the map, or an event bar on the timeline, and the same detail panel opens with the items behind that selection.

The Overview tab (heatmap)

The heatmap is the dashboard’s headline view. Rows are areas, columns are jurisdictions, and the colour of each cell tells you how much regulatory weight sits in that intersection. Red cells are where you need to be looking. Empty cells genuinely mean nothing is there.

The page also carries an Executive Intelligence card at the top (a pull-quote from the briefing’s bottom line, plus the next few key deadlines) and a Sentiment card (high-impact items as a percentage of total). Below the grid sits a “What’s Changed” panel if there’s a previous comparable scan to compare against (see What’s changed since last scan).

Why “RAG”

The colour scheme is the red-amber-green palette finance and compliance teams know from risk dashboards. Snapshot uses a smooth gradient from pale mint through pale gold to a deep red — the eye goes to the red.

What the colour represents is a deliberate choice. The scoring uses a shared, quasi-absolute denominator so a red cell in a small focused scan and a red cell in a big multi-jurisdiction scan mean the same thing. Two heatmaps from different scans are visually comparable.

How the score is built

Every regulatory item has two ratings:

• Impact — High, Medium, or Low.
• Likelihood — Confirmed, Likely, Possible, or Uncertain.

Each gets a weight:

The score for one item is impact_weight × likelihood_weight. The score for one cell is the average of those item scores across the items in the cell.

A cell only goes deep red when every item in it is High-impact AND Confirmed. A mixed cell with some High-Confirmed items and some Medium-Likely ones lands in the gold-to-orange band, regardless of how many items are in there. A red cell on the heatmap is a specific claim: “everything in here is severe.”

Reading a cell

Click any cell to open the detail panel for that area-and-jurisdiction. The panel slides in with all the items in that cell, ranked by impact and likelihood. Empty cells are uncoloured and inert.

In the top corners of cells you may see small change markers — a green dot for newly added items, an amber triangle for updated items, a red triangle for items removed since your last scan. Those only appear when there is a previous comparable scan to compare against. See What’s changed since last scan for the full change view.

The Briefing tab

The Briefing tab shows the executive narrative — an edited piece of prose that opens with Bottom Line Up Front, walks through the top priorities (each as its own bold heading), and closes with Trend Analysis, Key Deadlines, and a Watch List. The structure is deliberate: each section can be lifted into a one-page brief almost as-is.

A Listen affordance at the top of the page plays a synthesised reading of the briefing, with sentence highlighting as it goes. Useful if you prefer to absorb prose by ear or want to multitask while you read other items.

The narrative is a briefing artefact, not a source. Every fact in it traces back to an item you can find in a detail panel. If something in the narrative looks surprising, find the corresponding item and check its View source link.

The Trends tab

Trends is the analysis’s read on the patterns in your scan. The heatmap and timeline answer “what’s there?” and “when?”. Trends answers “what does it all mean together?”. You will find a small grid of typed cards, each one a short observation about a cross-cutting movement.

A typical scan produces three to six trend cards. They are complementary to the heatmap, not redundant: the heatmap shows you a hot cell; a Trends card tells you whether that hot cell is part of a wider movement or an outlier.

[!NOTE] A scan with very few items may produce a thin or empty Trends list. That is not a bug — the analysis does not invent trends out of nothing. If Trends is empty on a scan you expected to be rich, double-check the wizard settings — a too-narrow horizon or topic filter can starve the analysis.

The Timeline tab

The Timeline is the dashboard’s “what’s coming up and when” view. Where the heatmap compresses your scan into a grid of severity, the timeline lays it out as a calendar — a horizontal Gantt chart with one swimlane per jurisdiction, time flowing left-to-right, and every dated regulatory event sitting on the lane for its jurisdiction at the date it is expected to land.

This is the page you open when a colleague asks “what consultations close in the next two weeks?” or “what’s effective in Q3?”. It is also the page that makes deadlines impossible to miss: things hot enough to be High impact AND within 30 days are tagged Critical and rendered in red.

Each event is a coloured bar:

• Active (indigo) — Effective, Implementation Phase, or Final Rule.
• Proposed (amber) — Consultation or Proposed.
• Critical (red) — High-impact items within 30 days of today, regardless of status.

A vertical dashed line marks today. Zoom controls let you step the month-column width up or down (30% to 300%). Click any event bar to open its detail panel.

[!WARNING] A “Critical” badge means High impact AND within 30 days. It is not the same as “Confirmed likelihood”. An item flagged Possible-but-imminent will be Critical if its impact is High; an item flagged Confirmed-but-distant will not.

Only items with an expected date appear on the timeline. Date-TBD items show up in the heatmap and in detail panels but not on this page — by design.

The detail panel

The detail panel is what you see when you click a heatmap cell, a country on the map, or an event bar on the timeline. It is an overlay rather than a tab — a slide-in sheet listing every item in the selection you clicked.

Every item in the panel renders as a card with the same structure:

• Title — the regulation, consultation, or proposal name.
• Three badges — Status, Likelihood, Impact. Coloured to match the heatmap palette so a “High” badge is the same red you saw on the cell.
• Regulator — who is behind it (FCA, ECB, SEC, MAS, etc.).
• Expected date — when it goes effective, when consultation closes, or “Date TBD” if it is not pinned.
• Tags — topic tags the analysis attached.
• Summary — one paragraph describing what the item is, why it matters, and what it requires.
• View source → — a link to the regulator’s primary document or the most authoritative URL the research retrieved. Opens in a new tab.

Quick reference on the three badges

The combination of Impact and Likelihood is what feeds the heatmap colour.

[!NOTE] The detail panel itself does not have an export button — exports run from Studio. Every export Snapshot produces is scoped to the whole snapshot rather than a single item. If you need just one item shared, the View source link on the card is the cleanest path.

The Sources tab

The Sources tab shows every URL the research read while building the scan, grouped by item. Each row carries a small confidence colour that tells you what kind of source it is:

• Primary regulator source — green. Sourced directly from a primary regulator document (FCA, SEC, ESMA, etc.).
• Supranational body — amber. Sourced from a supranational standards body (BIS, FATF, IOSCO).
• Secondary commentary — grey. Sourced from secondary commentary — may not be from the primary regulator document. Useful as a cross-check.

If a finding in the briefing looks surprising, Sources is where you go to see what the research actually read.

Languages

You can switch the dashboard into a different language at any time using the language picker in the header. The first switch into a non-English language triggers a translation pass (you will see a brief overlay), and the result is cached on the snapshot so subsequent switches are instant. The translation covers item titles and summaries, the executive narrative, the executive summary structure (priorities, deadlines, watch list), and the trend cards.

[!WARNING] If you opened the dashboard from a fresh scan that has not been saved as a snapshot yet, on-demand translation cannot run — there is no snapshot to translate against. Save the snapshot first (this happens automatically on most scans), then switch languages.

Snapshots

Every scan you run is saved as a snapshot. The My Snapshots tab is your history — title, date, jurisdictions, and a row of small badges showing what was scanned. Click one to load it into the dashboard; the URL, filter state, language cache, and any exports you generated all come back with it.

• Star a snapshot to pin it at the top.
• The Re-scan affordance on a snapshot card pre-fills the wizard with that snapshot’s exact configuration, so you can run it again on today’s data with one tweak (or none).
• Snapshots get an 8-character identifier that shows up on Studio artefacts so you can match a downloaded PDF back to the scan it came from.

Beyond the basics

The combinations are where the dashboard pays back time. Two non-obvious moves:

• Filter, then switch views. Drop Status = Consultation in the filter sidebar, then jump to Timeline. You now see only consultations on the calendar — the quickest way to answer “what’s open for industry response in the next 60 days?” without scrolling the full picture.
• Use the Sources tab as a sanity check. When the Briefing surfaces an unexpected priority, open Sources and look for the matching item’s rows. A primary-regulator (green) source is high-trust; a grey secondary-commentary-only item is worth verifying before quoting.

For developers

Everything on this page is also available programmatically. The dashboard renders one snapshot; the same data is exposed via the API at GET /v1/snapshots/{id}, with the executive narrative at /v1/snapshots/{id}/executive-narrative and the underlying items at /v1/snapshots/{id}/items. See the API overview for the full surface.

Where to go next

• Studio — turn any view into a tearsheet, infographic, audio briefing, slide deck, or PDF.
• What’s changed since last scan — change tracking on recurring scans.
• Your first scan — the wizard walk-through.