A measure is a numeric value that can be aggregated: summed, averaged, counted, or taken as a minimum or maximum. Revenue, quantity sold, hours worked, cost, temperature, number of visits. When you build a chart, the measure is the height of the bar or the position of the line; the dimension is what the bars are labelled with. “Units by product” is one measure and one dimension.
Measures are the raw material of every KPI. A distributor’s tables hold order value, quantity, cost and delivery time as measures; from them come revenue, margin, average order value and on-time percentage. Understanding which columns are measures is the first step in building a dashboard, because it determines what can be totalled and what cannot. Summing a column of unit prices produces nonsense; summing a column of order values produces revenue.
The confusion is between a measure and a metric. A measure is a column of numbers; a metric is a defined calculation on measures that means something to the business — “net revenue” is a metric built from the gross-revenue and refund measures. Rule of thumb: measures come from the data, metrics are decided by people. And always know the aggregation: “average of averages” is the classic way to get the wrong answer.
In Klayara, measures are picked up automatically from your tables, each chart lets you choose how a measure is aggregated, and new measures are created with formulas from existing ones. See dashboards.