Reporting your team trusts
Six questions. See how much of your business you can answer without asking anyone.
Can you answer these six without asking anyone?
Six questions your team gets asked most weeks. Answer for a normal Tuesday.
1. How much work is in flight right now?
2. What is stuck, and for how long has it been stuck?
3. What did we finish last week?
4. What is at risk of missing a date?
5. What did last month cost to deliver?
6. Where did the last ten customers come from?
Answerable without asking anyone
0 of 6
Answer the six to see where you stand.
The read
Do this next
Show the reasoning
A second opinion
Want to know which one to fix first?
We reply within one business day.
What this usually leads to
A reporting problem is usually a process problem wearing a costume. If numbers are hard to produce because the work is hard to follow, process automation fixes the cause rather than the symptom, and fractional operations is the version where somebody owns the numbers week to week instead of at quarter end.
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A number nobody trusts is worse than none. We define each metric once, give it an owner and a source system, then automate the pull so it arrives without anyone assembling it.
Is it a fit?
Agreement
Two reports give two revenue numbers, and both of them are defensible.
Rebuild
Somebody assembles the same figures by hand every Monday morning.
Use
Each report has a person who opens it and a decision it changes.
What you get
Metric definitions
Every number written down once: what it counts, what it excludes, who owns it and how often it should move.
One source per number
Deciding which system is authoritative for each figure so two reports of the same thing stop disagreeing.
Automated pulls
The figure arrives without anybody assembling it.
Operating dashboards
A small number of screens answering the questions asked in the weekly meeting.
Why most reporting projects end in a screen nobody opens
The usual sequence is backwards. Somebody buys a tool, connects it to whatever it will connect to, and builds the charts the data happens to allow rather than the ones the business needs. It looks impressive in the demo and gets opened twice.
Start from the questions instead. There are usually five or six that get asked out loud every week in the same meeting. How much is in flight. What is stuck and for how long. What did we finish. What is at risk. What did it cost. Everything beyond those is optional until those six are answered without anyone assembling anything.
See alsoaccounting and bookkeeping bookkeeper, accountant, or fractional CFO migrate the data or start clean an admin dashboard a fractional chief of staff
Questions we get
We already have dashboards. Why would this be different?
Because the problem is usually upstream of the dashboard. If two people define the same metric differently, no amount of charting fixes it, and the screen becomes something people argue with rather than act on.
Which tools do you use?
Whatever you already have, wherever that is honest. Sheets and Looker Studio go a long way and cost nothing. Airtable, Metabase, Power BI and the reporting already built into your CRM or finance system are all fine.
How long before we see something?
The definitions and the question list come out of the first week, and they are usually the first time anyone has seen the business described that way.
Our data is messy. Is that a problem?
It is the normal starting condition and it is not a reason to wait. Messy usually means duplicates, missing fields and three conventions for the same thing, all of which are visible once you look.
When two systems report different figures, the cost of settling them is larger than the typing that created the pair.
More in the guides and every answer in one place.
Shaheer leads the work, with engineers, writers, filers and analysts behind him. C-suite operations for a San Francisco AI company, Six Sigma on the process side, Anthropic certified on the Model Context Protocol, ten years across eight industries. See what we have built
Read next
The measurement this depends on, the work that usually follows it, and the terms used here.