Knowledgebase
How to change the admin startup page in Magento
By default, when you access the admin panel of your Magento the dashboard is displayed as a home page. You can change the landing page to any other admin page. For example, when you log in to the admin panel you may want the Catalog>Manage Products page to be displayed automatically.
You can do this by changing a single setting in the admin panel. Go to System menu>Configuration>Admin button in the Advanced section on the left>Startup Page panel on the right. In the Startup Page panel there's a drop-down menu labeled Startup Page and it's set to Dashboard by default. Use the drop-down menu to select one of the pages in the admin panel and click on the Save Config button.