Quick Filters Bar on Dashboards: Setup, Permissions, and Daily Use
The quick filters bar is a small row of filter chips that sits at the top of a dashboard, above the widgets. It lets people narrow the whole dashboard — pick a brand, a queue, a date range — without entering edit mode and without opening the full filters panel. You choose which handful of filters belong on the bar, you save the filters everyone starts from, and you decide who is allowed to change them. This guide covers setting one up on a dashboard and permissioning it. The same bar works on World Heat Maps, covered in World Heat Maps: Shared Default Filters, Quick Filters Bar, and Access Control.
Before you start
The feature is account-level. Quick filters bars have to be switched on for your whole account before they can be added to any dashboard. Step 1 covers it.
Who can add a bar. Adding a bar to a dashboard — and removing it — requires the ability to manage that dashboard's user access, because the bar changes the dashboard for everyone who opens it. Simply being able to edit the dashboard is not enough.
It is not a replacement for widget filters. The bar layers on top of the filters each widget already carries. Widget-level and dashboard-level filtering are explained in Comprehensive Guide to Filters in Qvasa Dashboards.
1. Turn the feature on for your account
Go to Settings > Top Level Account Settings and search for Quick Filters Bar. Enable it. The setting is called Enable Quick Filters Bar on Dashboards and World Heat Maps, and it applies to both surfaces at once.
If you cannot find the setting, it has not been made available on your account yet — contact Qvasa Support and we will turn it on.
2. Add a filters bar to a dashboard
Open the dashboard and click Edit. The bar is added from edit mode.
In the toolbar that appears, click Filters Bar. The button only shows on dashboards that do not already have one.
The bar appears immediately, above the first row of widgets, with a date chip and nothing else on it yet. It is named after the dashboard, for example Talk Performance Scorecard Filters.
Everyone who could already edit this dashboard, individually or through a user group, is automatically given full rights over the new bar. You do not have to go back and re-permission your existing editors.
3. Choose the filters that go on the bar
Click the + at the end of the bar to add a filter, and pick what it should filter on. You can add up to six filters alongside the date chip — the limit is deliberate, since the point of the bar is the short list people actually use. Remove one with the x on its chip.
The filters you can put on a bar are:
Static attributes — any ticket or agent attribute your account captures, such as brand, priority, channel or queue. The chip takes the attribute's own name.
Tags and Exclude Tags, and the same pair for Organization Tags.
Zendesk organization dropdown fields.
Filter sets — a saved combination of filters appears as a single chip, so one pick applies the whole set.
Ticket country and messaging session country.
Agent groups and agent primary groups.
Qualitative question answers and generative workflow reasons, for both ticket and bot workflows, each available as an include or an exclude chip.
The date chip is there from the start and filters the whole dashboard by date and time. Turn it off if the dashboard is purely live and a date range would only confuse people.
4. Save the filters everyone starts from
Filters are saved on the bar itself, not on your own user, so whatever you save is what every viewer sees when they open the dashboard.
Pick values in the chips. The widgets reload with those filters applied.
A yellow banner appears: Unsaved filter changes — these filters are temporary and will reset on page refresh. That is the honest state of things: what you just picked applies to your session only.
Click Save as Default to make the current picks this bar's default for everyone.
Two related controls sit at the right of the bar. The eraser icon, Revert to Default, drops whatever you have picked and puts the saved defaults back. The Enabled toggle switches the whole bar off for your session, reloading every widget with only its own saved filters — useful for checking what a widget shows on its own, without the bar layered on top.
5. Decide who can do what
Bar permissions are granted per dashboard, on the dashboard's access page (Manage Users Access To Dashboard), the same page used for dashboard access generally — see Managing User Permissions in Qvasa. Each user row and each group row carries a Quick Filters Bar Permissions block beside the dashboard permissions, with four levels:
See (“Can view quick filters bar state”) — the bar is visible and shows which filters are applied, but nothing can be changed. These viewers see a small note telling them the bar is view-only for them.
Change (“Can change and apply filters”) — can pick values in the chips and apply them for their own session. This is the right level for most people.
Save (“Can save current filters as default”) — can press Save as Default and change what everyone else starts from.
Edit (“Can configure, lock/unlock, and rename filter bar”) — can add and remove chips, turn the date chip on or off, and rename the bar.
The levels are a ladder, and Qvasa keeps it consistent for you: granting a higher one automatically grants everything below it. Give someone Edit on the bar and they get save and change too; give someone edit rights on the dashboard itself and they get the whole bar.
Two things happen without a per-dashboard grant. Users with the account-level permission to edit all open dashboards (or all agent dashboards) have full rights over the bars on those dashboards. And groups work exactly like users here — grant a group the Change level and every member can move the chips.
Using the bar day to day
A chip pick is temporary until it is saved. Anyone with Change can filter the dashboard for themselves, and a refresh puts the saved defaults back. Only Save as Default changes what other people see.
Tabs can have their own bar. If a dashboard uses tabs, a tab can carry its own quick filters bar, and that bar takes over from the dashboard's while you are on that tab — handy when one tab reports on a different population than the rest.
Shared external links can use the bar. When you share a dashboard externally, you can grant the link permission to change quick filters, so people outside Qvasa can move the chips. They cannot turn the bar off or save defaults. See Sharing Dashboards Externally with Non-Qvasa Users.
Exports and embeds leave it out. Scheduled dashboard image exports and iframe embeds render the charts only, so the bar does not appear in them. Whatever is saved as the default is what those renders are filtered by.
What done looks like
Opening the dashboard shows a short row of chips with your saved defaults already applied — nobody has to build a filter to get a useful view.
Most of your team can narrow the dashboard themselves, and a page refresh always brings the agreed starting point back.
Only the handful of people you named can change what everyone else starts from, or reshape the bar.
Troubleshooting
There is no Filters Bar button in edit mode. Either the dashboard already has a bar, the feature is not enabled on the account (step 1), or you do not have the rights to manage this dashboard's access.
Someone says the chips do nothing for them. They have See but not Change. Their bar shows a view-only note on hover. Raise them a level on the dashboard's access page.
The + button is greyed out. The bar is at its limit of six filters alongside the date chip. Remove one to add another.
Filters keep coming back after a refresh. That is the saved default reasserting itself. If the default is wrong, pick the right filters and click Save as Default.
A widget ignores the bar. Check whether the bar is toggled to Disabled for your session, and remember that widget formulas compute each of their components from that component's own saved filters.