Start with the result you need
You are preparing a market review. You need population and banking-access figures for a spreadsheet, a view of how payment methods have developed, and a chart that colleagues can put into a presentation. Those are three related jobs, but copying numbers from individual pages is a slow way to do them. Workbench brings the data and visual work into one place inside Aurato Hub.
Its two working areas are Datasets and Charts. Use Datasets when you want observations to analyse in your own tools. Use Charts when you want to explore a question visually or produce an image or animation. Dashboard serves a different part of the workflow: following records, comparing them and returning to favorites. Workbench is where you shape the output.
Find a dataset by subject, publisher or market
Open Hub, choose Workbench, then Datasets. Each card identifies its publisher, describes its contents and shows the number of indicators, available years and, for multi-market exports, market coverage. World Development Indicators from the World Bank provides population, GDP, GDP per capita and GDP growth. The IMF Financial Access Survey covers ATMs and bank branches per 100,000 adults, plus debit and credit cards per adult.
The catalog also includes payment-statistics exports grouped by publisher, such as a central bank. Search accepts dataset names, publisher names and keys or slugs, making a query such as ECB useful. The Markets filter selects datasets covering a country. It filters the catalog; it does not turn a multi-market download into a country-only file. Read the card’s coverage before exporting.
Choose a year or the available history
The first download button names the most recent available observation year for that dataset. Use it for a current cross-section. The adjacent button displays the available year range and downloads the full history. The year on a button refers to the data, so it can differ from the year in which you download it. A release arriving this year may report activity from an earlier year.
The file structure depends on the export. International-institution snapshots arrange indicators around each market; their historical exports use rows by market, indicator and year. Payment-statistics exports carry observations with metric keys, values, units, periods, record and market context, observation kind, notes and source links. Keep those columns when importing the file. The public catalog remains browsable, while downloads and Charts require Pro access, including the equivalent access carried by Pro+.
Build a chart in three decisions
Open Charts in Workbench. The controls are organised as Design, Data and Series, with the preview alongside them. A new chart starts with India, payment methods, Users and a ten-year window. That gives you a starting view, rather than requiring a configuration before anything can be drawn.
First choose the visual form in Design. Race emphasises changing rank: which methods move into or out of the leading positions? Line emphasises the trajectory of each selected series. Bubble lets you compare metrics at each point in time, with an optional second metric and optional sizing metric. Choose the chart for the question you want a reader to answer; a movement in rank and a movement in absolute value are different stories.
| Chart | Question it helps answer |
|---|---|
| Race | Which series lead, and how do their ranks change? |
| Line | How does the trajectory of each series develop over time? |
| Bubble | How do one, two or three metrics relate at a chosen time? |
Set the market scope and time window
The Market control accepts more than one market. Select one for a local view or several for a combined scope. For Methods and Schemes, multiple selected markets combine the available observations for the same series and period. That is a sum across markets with data, rather than a guarantee of complete regional coverage. With Markets as the series type, the selected countries remain separate series to compare.
Period offers ten, five, three or one year. Payment-method histories use monthly observations; scheme and market histories use annual observations. A ten-year setting therefore does not imply the same number of plotted points for every series type. Shorten the window to inspect a recent change, then widen it again to see whether the apparent shift is part of a longer trend.
Match the metric to the series
The Series type selector offers Methods, Schemes and Markets. Methods supports Users, Transactions and TPV. Schemes supports Transactions and TPV. Markets adds economic and access indicators, including Population, GDP, GDP per Capita, GDP Growth, ATMs, Banks, Debit Cards and Credit Cards. The access indicators retain their denominators: Banks means bank branches per 100,000 adults, while card penetration is measured per adult.
For a Bubble chart, Metric A sets the vertical value. Metric B, when selected, sets the horizontal value; leaving it unset uses time on the horizontal axis. Bubble metric controls relative bubble area, and can be left unset for equal-size marks. For example, compare transaction counts with users and use TPV for size. That shows three aspects of scale without treating them as interchangeable.
Choose and highlight the series that matter
Search within Series to find a name, or use All and None to rebuild the selection quickly. These controls apply to the available dataset, including series outside the current search result. There is no manual selection limit. Initial choices stay smaller for large cross-market comparisons, so check the list before assuming that every available series is displayed.
The series control cycles through included, highlighted and excluded states. Highlight a method you want readers to follow while keeping other series for context. In a Race, ten rows are visible at once, but all selected series participate in the historical ranking. A method outside those rows can enter the visible leaders later; selecting more series is meaningful even when they do not all fit on screen together.
Pause the animation to read a period
The timeline, Play/Pause control and playback speeds help separate watching from inspecting. Let the animation run to notice the broad movement, then pause or move the timeline to a particular month or year. In a Line or Bubble chart, selecting a plotted mark reveals its series and values. A static inspection often explains a crossing or rank change more clearly than repeated playback.
A smooth transition is a visual aid between observations. It does not create a new reported observation for every animation frame. Missing history also remains a coverage issue: a gap or an absent mark should not be interpreted as a real zero.
A practical market-review workflow
Begin in Datasets with a market filter, identify the relevant national payment-statistics publisher and review the years and indicators on its card. Download the latest year for a current summary, or the history for your own trend analysis. Add World Bank or IMF context where the question needs a population, economic or access denominator, keeping those definitions separate from payment volumes.
Next open Charts, choose that market and Methods, then use Transactions with a Line chart to see the historical direction. Switch to Race if changing leadership is the story, or Bubble to compare transaction activity, users and TPV. Reduce the series to a useful set, highlight the subject of the review and inspect the period behind the conclusion. Export the appropriate format and retain the dataset’s source links, scope and observation years alongside it. The finished chart can be concise because the analysis behind it remains traceable.