Dashboard

The dashboard is the home screen. It’s a single-page read-out of what’s happening in the firm right now: who’s instructing, what’s due, what your team’s been touching in Notion, how long the courts and the LRS are taking. It’s a viewing surface — you don’t fill anything in here, you scan it and decide what to open.

This page walks the dashboard top-to-bottom and explains what each panel is for.

Greeting and weather

The first thing you see is a time-aware greeting — “Good morning, Rodney.” in the morning, “Good evening” after 5pm. Underneath sits a one-line subtitle: a short tagline (“Dedicated to the cause.”) and, when WeatherKit is configured and has data, the current temperature and condition for your location (“It’s 18° and drizzling”).

The greeting and subtitle rotate through small pools of phrases keyed to time-of-day buckets (morning, early afternoon, afternoon, evening). It’s flavour, not signal — the dashboard re-picks on every appearance so you never see the same line for long.

Note

Weather only renders when WeatherKit has location permission and a current reading. If you’ve declined location access, or you’re offline, the temperature line is simply omitted — the greeting still works. WeatherKit configuration lives in Settings.

Toolbar and PNM banner

Directly below the greeting sits the toolbar — search, New Matter, New PNM, New Doc, and a folder-picker. The search field filters across all matters; the action buttons each open the relevant wizard.

If you have folders in your matters root that aren’t linked to a Notion Lead or Matter, a transient banner appears under the toolbar prompting you to triage them. Tap Triage now to open the reconciliation view, or dismiss the banner with the close button — it’ll stay dismissed unless the orphan count changes meaningfully. See Potential New Matters for the folders-without-leads workflow.

Key Dates Coming Up

A full-width horizontal strip of the most urgent dates across all your active matters: settlement, exchange, probate filings, anything time-critical that templates have marked as a key date. Each card shows the date, a short caption, and the matter number.

Up to 8 cards render before the strip starts scrolling horizontally. Cards combine two data sources:

• Critical dates — anything dated in the near future that the template has flagged as a key date for that matter type
• Recently created — matters created in the last 24 hours, so a brand-new matter surfaces here before it picks up any dates of its own

Tapping a card opens that matter’s workspace.

Tip

The strip is sorted by date, soonest first. If it’s empty (“Nothing critical in the next few days. Quiet stretch.”), you genuinely have nothing pressing — not a sync error.

The signals grid

Below Key Dates sits the dashboard’s centre of gravity: a three-column grid of the live signals you check most often. At typical window widths you see all three columns side by side. The grid reflows at narrower widths — see Responsive layout below.

Open Leads

The left-most column shows Potential New Matters — enquiries that haven’t been converted to matters yet. Each row is a person and a matter type (“Darcy J. · Wills · new”). Idle leads get a badge so you can see what’s been sitting untouched.

When there are folders in your matters root that don’t yet have a Notion record, a ”📁 N orphan folders →” affordance appears at the bottom of the column. Tap it to open the reconciliation view and link them up.

For the full lead-to-matter flow, see Potential New Matters.

Recent Matters

The middle column has two sub-sections stacked vertically:

• PINNED (N) — matters you’ve pinned, up to a cap of 4
• RECENT (N) — the most-recently-opened matters, grouped by recency

Each row shows the matter number and a short identifier (surname + matter type). Tap a row to jump into the matter workspace.

To pin or unpin a matter, hover the row to reveal the pin icon, or use the context menu. Pinned matters stay visible at the top regardless of how long it’s been since you opened them — useful for the matters you want one click away even if you haven’t touched them this week.

Note

Pinned matters are personal — they don’t sync with Notion or with other team members. They’re a local convenience.

Recently Updated in Notion

The right-most column shows the 8 most-recently-updated matters from your Notion matters database. This is where you see motion across the firm in real time: a matter changes status, a colleague adds a note, a property settles — it surfaces here within a few minutes.

The column is purely informational. Tap a row to open the matter, but the column itself doesn’t filter or sort — it’s just the freshest 8.

Tip

This is the panel that makes the dashboard feel “alive” for a multi-person firm. If you’re working solo it’s quieter; the value scales with the number of people touching Notion.

The bottom row

Beneath the signals grid sits a two-panel row: NSW Processing Times on the left (wider) and By the Numbers on the right (narrower).

NSW Processing Times

A reference panel showing how long the Supreme Court of NSW and NSW Land Registry Services are currently taking on common dealings:

• Supreme Court — probate, letters of administration, and related applications
• NSW LRS — electronic and paper dealings registration

Both blocks cache for an hour, so the values refresh in the background as you work. The “last updated” timestamp at the bottom of the panel tells you when the data was last pulled.

Tapping the Supreme Court block opens the Wills and Probate page on the Supreme Court site; tapping the LRS block opens Current Registration Progress on the LRS site. Both are the official sources Certum Draft scrapes.

Note

If the panel shows dashes or stale data, the underlying source pages may be unreachable. Both Court and LRS data refresh in the background hourly; nothing you do on the dashboard triggers a manual refresh.

By the Numbers

A compact panel summarising your firm’s recent activity. It has two sections:

• Today — the number of documents created today, with a rotating tagline beneath (“lovingly crafted”, “diligently filed”, “billable hours well spent”, “what the partners ordered” and similar). A sub-line shows the running weekly total.
• What the firm’s doing — the top 5 matter types in your matters root, by count, with percentages. Anything past the top 4 collapses into “Everything else”.

The document counts come from filesystem scans of each matter’s Working Documents folder — they’re a real measure of files produced today, not a Notion count or a billing approximation.

Tap a matter-type row in the breakdown to pre-fill the dashboard search with that type — useful for jumping straight from “we do a lot of Wills” to the list of every Wills matter you have.

Tip

The tagline rotates on every dashboard appearance, with a small recent-rejection memory so you don’t see the same line twice in a row. It’s dry deadpan rather than corporate cheer — calibrated to sit comfortably next to “Dedicated to the cause.” up top.

Responsive layout

The signals grid reflows based on the dashboard’s available width:

Width	Layout
≥ 960pt	3-column grid: Open Leads / Recent / Recently Updated side by side
640–959pt	2-column grid: Open Leads and Recent on row 1, Recently Updated stacks below at full width
< 640pt	1-column stack: every panel full-width in vertical order

The bottom row tracks the same breakpoints — at the widest setting it splits 2/3 + 1/3 (Processing Times wider, By the Numbers narrower); at narrower widths the two panels stack.

Note

The 960pt and 640pt thresholds were lowered in 0.9.193 (from the original 1100pt and 800pt) so the full 3-column layout is reachable at typical window widths without having to maximise the window. If you keep Certum Draft in a narrower side-by-side configuration with another app, the grid still works — it just collapses gracefully.

What’s not on the dashboard

A few panels from earlier versions have been retired:

• Today / Someday cockpit — the committed-matters list that let you stage matters into “do today” / “do someday” buckets was removed in 0.9.192. It wasn’t earning its space.
• Needs Attention card — the stale-Notion-matters surface was folded away; Notion’s own UI already shows that signal.
• Standalone Activity card — collapsed into By the Numbers, which now carries both the docs count and the matter-type breakdown.

If you used Today / Someday and miss it, the underlying personal-state model is still intact — the surface just isn’t drawn. Pinned matters in the Recent column cover most of the same “what should I work on today” need.

Related

• Potential New Matters — what feeds the Open Leads column
• Creating a New Matter — what happens when you click New Matter in the toolbar
• Settings — where WeatherKit, folder locations and other dashboard inputs are configured