Reports & decisions / GUIDE + WORKSHEET
Automate the weekly report without automating bad numbers
Build reliable weekly reporting with a metric contract, source checks, refresh ownership, and a worked example you can reproduce.
THE STARTING POINT
Define the decision and the number before automating collection. Agree on source fields, included records, time boundaries, and a freshness check. Reconcile a small example by hand, then automate the repeatable steps and make missing or stale inputs visible to the report's reader.
Write the question the report should answer
Start with the meeting or action the report supports. 'Which completed jobs still need an invoice?' is more actionable than a wall of unrelated totals. For each metric, document what it counts, the record-level detail behind it, the source, and its exclusions. Decide who can explain a discrepancy instead of leaving the report owner to guess.
Prove one reporting period
Select a small set of representative records and calculate the expected output manually. Include cancellations, late updates, and missing information. Fix the reporting period and time zone so a record cannot drift between weeks unnoticed. Compare your manual result with the proposed automation before scheduling it. Keep this example as a regression check for later changes.
Publish freshness and exceptions with the result
Show when source data was last available and what is excluded or awaiting review. A scheduled email should not imply the underlying refresh succeeded. Decide whether missing inputs should stop publication or produce a clearly labeled partial report. Assign someone to maintain definitions when business processes or source fields change.
WORKED EXAMPLE / ILLUSTRATIVE
A fictional completed-jobs report
The question is which jobs were completed during the chosen week and remain uninvoiced at the cutoff. Only J-101 qualifies. J-102 is already invoiced and J-103 is not complete; counting all three would answer a different question.
| Job | State at cutoff | Include? |
|---|---|---|
| J-101 | Complete, no invoice | Yes |
| J-102 | Complete, invoice issued | No |
| J-103 | Work in progress | No |
MAKE IT USEFUL
Weekly reporting contract
Define one metric before connecting its data sources.
Your notes stay in this page and are not sent to Smithers. Download or copy them before leaving; refreshing clears them.
Before you put it to work
- Reproduce a small result manually.
- Keep period boundaries explicit.
- Show stale or incomplete inputs.
- Assign a definition owner.
A report can be consistently automated and consistently wrong. Validate the meaning of the result, not just the schedule.
IF THIS LOOKS FAMILIAR
Your tools. Your particular mess.
The worksheet is yours to use. If the difficult part is making it work with the systems you already have, that's the kind of thing we help with.