How to Use HubSpot's Custom Report Builder to Show the Board Where Revenue Actually Comes From

Step Four: Filters

Filters determine which records actually appear in your report. They're where precision comes from.

The filter logic options are: ALL of the filters below (AND logic, every condition must be true), ANY of the filters below (OR logic, at least one condition must be true), or Custom filter rules (where you write your own AND/OR combinations, including NOT logic).

A few things worth knowing about filters in HubSpot's report builder:

Date-based filters like "This month" use the account's time zone, not your local time zone. If your team is distributed across time zones, the data in the report will be consistent. But the dates you see when you drill in might look slightly different depending on where you are sitting.

"This week" starts on a Monday.

Certain filter conditions, including "is not equal to any of" and "doesn't contain any of", will exclude records that have no value for the filtered property. Keep this in mind when building filters for pipeline or attribution reports, where empty fields are common. List-based filters have their own quirks, which matter if you are reporting on active list usage across workflows.

Take the GST Out Before It Reaches a Revenue Total

This one is specific to Australian portals and it catches a lot of them. Deal amounts get entered the way they appear on the quote, which is usually GST inclusive. Every report that sums Amount and calls the result revenue then runs about ten per cent hot, and nobody notices until an investor holds your dashboard up against your P&L.

The arithmetic: one eleventh of a GST inclusive amount is GST. A deal entered as $55,000 is $50,000 of revenue and $5,000 of GST. A year that reports as $2.2m of closed won is $2m of revenue.

Two ways to fix it, both fine:

• Change what goes in the field. Agree that deal Amount is always ex GST and let your invoicing system add the tax. Cleanest, and free. It only holds if the whole sales team does it, so pair it with a required field or a validation step.
• Adjust in a property. Create a calculated deal property, Amount ex GST, with the formula Amount divided by 1.1. Use that property as the measure in every revenue report and leave Amount alone for quoting.

Then build the report the way you would build any other: single object, Deals as the primary data source, Close date as the dimension, and Sum of Amount ex GST as the measure instead of Sum of Amount.

Two things to watch. If part of what you sell is GST free, dividing everything by 1.1 is wrong for those deals, so split by revenue type or add a GST applicable property and filter on it. And if you find yourself writing three calculated properties to hold the adjustment together, that is a fair sign you have hit the edge of what configuration should be doing, which is the subject of knowing when to stop configuring HubSpot and start writing code.

The Dashboards That Actually Matter for Investor Reporting

Building reports is one thing. Organising them into dashboards that tell a coherent story is what makes the difference in a board meeting.

Here are the dashboards worth building if you are reporting on ROI and business performance:

Marketing performance dashboard

The reports to include: new contacts by source (bar chart, broken down by Original Source), MQL volume by month (line chart), email campaign click-to-deal conversion rate (table), website sessions to contact conversion rate (KPI), and cost per lead if you are connecting ad spend data.

This tells you where your leads are coming from, which channels are converting, and whether volume is growing month-on-month.

Pipeline and revenue dashboard

The reports to include: open deal pipeline by stage (horizontal bar or funnel), deals closed this quarter vs last (combination chart with deal count on one axis and deal value on the other), average deal size by source (bar chart), win rate by sales rep (table), and time-to-close trend over time (line chart).

This shows the health of your pipeline, where deals are getting stuck, and whether revenue is accelerating.

Lifecycle and conversion dashboard

The reports to include: contacts by lifecycle stage (KPI set or donut chart), average time between lifecycle stage transitions (table), lead-to-MQL conversion rate, MQL-to-SQL conversion rate, and SQL-to-Customer conversion rate (all KPIs or a combination chart showing the full funnel).

The story this tells is funnel efficiency. For investors, this is often the most important dashboard because it shows whether your unit economics are improving over time.

ROI attribution dashboard

The reports to include: deals created by original contact source (bar chart), revenue closed by original contact source (bar chart), and a comparison of marketing-sourced vs sales-sourced pipeline (combination chart or KPI side by side).

This tells which channels are producing revenue, not just leads. This is the report that justifies the marketing budget. Use the ex GST measure here, because this is the dashboard people quote numbers from.

If different customers or business units need their own cut of the same reports, building specific dashboards for each customer saves you rebuilding the lot four times.

A Few Things to Know About Limits and Refresh Rates

Reports built in the custom report builder refresh automatically every two hours. If you need fresher data before the next automatic refresh, you can manually refresh a report or an entire dashboard once every fifteen minutes.

For non-table reports, there is a limit of 1,000 unique rows of data. If your report is returning fewer results than expected, adding filters to narrow the dataset will usually resolve it. Table reports are paginated and can exceed 1,000 rows.

New records take ten to fifteen minutes to appear in reports after they are created. So if you just closed a deal and it is not showing up yet, wait a few minutes and refresh.

Wrapping Up

The custom report builder is not complicated once you understand the logic behind it. Primary data source sets the lens. Dimensions give you the categories. Measures give you the numbers. Chart type determines how clearly the story reads. Filters make the data precise. And in an Australian portal, the GST adjustment decides whether the revenue number survives contact with the P&L.

Get those six things right consistently, and you can build a reporting setup that makes every investor conversation significantly easier. Because the data is already organised into a narrative before anyone asks a question.

If you're not sure where to start or your HubSpot reporting setup needs a proper audit, that is exactly the kind of work we do. Have a look at NBH's RevOps and HubSpot reporting work, or give us a nudge and we'll help you build your own.

Love a good HubSpot hack? Subscribe to our YouTube channel for deep-dives and more HubSpot guides. Follow us on Facebook to stay in the loop with the latest updates.

Happy HubSpotting.