Most reporting problems are plumbing problems.
Dashboards are the easy part. The reason your numbers disagree is upstream, in how data is captured, where it lives, and who decided what a closed case means.
Two reports, two answers, one meeting.
Someone asks a simple question. Finance answers one way, operations another. Both are reading real data. Neither is wrong, exactly. They are counting different things, and nobody ever wrote down which definition is the company's.
Buying a BI tool does not fix this. It renders the disagreement faster, and in colour.
The work is upstream: capture the data properly at the moment it is created, define the terms once, and make the definition live inside the system rather than inside somebody's head.
How many active cases do we have?
In dispute1,740
1,402
1,621
Apply the definitions. Watch three answers become one.
Three teams, three answers, all reading real data.
From capture to decision.
In roughly the order the problems have to be solved.
- 01
Data model and definitions
One agreed meaning for the terms your business argues about, encoded where it cannot drift: active case, closed month, billable hour.
- 02
Pipelines and warehousing
Getting data out of the systems that hold it, on a schedule, reliably, with failures that announce themselves rather than going quiet.
- 03
Operational dashboards
Built for the person making the decision this afternoon, not for the person who commissioned the report last quarter.
- 04
Executive and board reporting
The monthly pack, generated rather than assembled, so nobody spends three days a month rebuilding it in a spreadsheet.
- 05
Reconciliation and controls
Automated checks that surface a discrepancy the day it appears, instead of during a quarter-end that is already tense.
- 06
Embedded reporting
Numbers inside the tool where the work happens, so people do not have to go somewhere else to find out how they are doing.
Definitions before dashboards.
A dashboard built on contested definitions just moves the argument to a bigger screen.
- 01
Define
Agree what the words mean, in a room with the people who disagree about them. This is the least technical and most valuable week of the project.
- 02
Capture
Fix the point of entry. Data that is wrong when it is created cannot be repaired downstream, only reconciled.
- 03
Model
A structure that answers the questions you actually ask, rather than a faithful copy of whatever the source systems happen to store.
- 04
Deliver
Dashboards, reports and alerts. Then we watch which ones get opened, and remove the ones that do not.
One number, and everyone can say where it came from.
Agreed definitions