Asana portfolios let you group projects together and see their status at a glance. What they don’t give you out of the box: historical trends, flexible calculations, or robust analytics beyond high‑level status summaries and basic dashboards. If you manage multiple projects and need real portfolio reporting, here’s what to expect.
Native portfolio reporting in Asana
Asana’s portfolio feature (available on Advanced, Enterprise, and Enterprise+ tiers) provides:
- Status overview – see which projects are on track, at risk, or off track
- Project milestones – view upcoming milestones across the portfolio
- Workload view – check team capacity across projects
- Dashboard widgets – add charts scoped to the portfolio
This works for a quick health check. The limitation: Asana doesn’t store portfolio‑level snapshots or rich time‑series history, so you can’t easily answer questions like how your portfolio looked last quarter without exporting data.
The portfolio reporting gap
When you need actual portfolio analytics, Asana’s native tools fall short:
- Limited cross-project analytics – Dashboards can roll up basic metrics (like task counts and some custom fields) across projects and even portfolios, but they’re constrained to predefined chart types and filters.
- No historical data – portfolios show today’s status, not last week’s or last month’s
- Basic calculated KPIs only – Formula custom fields let you do simple calculations (e.g., difference between dates or numeric fields), but building robust portfolio‑level KPIs like on‑time delivery rates or multi‑step performance indices still requires external reporting.
- Custom field limit – Limits on how many custom fields you can apply to a project or portfolio (commonly around 100) can restrict reporting for very complex operations
For PMOs, agencies, or teams running multiple concurrent projects, these gaps make executive reporting difficult.
Workaround: universal reporting
Asana’s Universal Reporting feature lets you create charts that pull data from multiple projects. You can build task breakdowns and custom field visualizations across your workspace.
The catch: Universal Reporting is great for live, aggregated charts, but it doesn’t store point‑in‑time snapshots or support complex, BI‑style calculations. You get basic trend charts and simple formula fields, not full historical analytics.
It’s better than project-by-project reporting, it still but won’t give you the portfolio analytics executives typically ask for.
Better alternative for Asana portfolio reporting: Multi-project dashboards
If you’ve hit these limits, BlinkMetrics connects to your Asana workspace and builds the cross-project reporting Asana can’t:
- Aggregated metrics – pull data from all projects into unified dashboards
- Historical snapshots – track portfolio health over time, not just today
- Custom KPIs – define calculated metrics across your entire portfolio
- No field limits – report on any data without hitting Asana’s caps
How to close the Asana portfolio reporting gap
Asana portfolios provide basic status visibility and simple roll‑ups for grouped projects. For deeper historical tracking, richer aggregated metrics, and truly custom KPIs across your portfolio, you’ll still need a reporting layer like BlinkMetrics that can capture and analyze data over time.
