Verification checklist for scheduled board and executive reports
Problem
A scheduled report leaves the warehouse and lands in an executive inbox or a board pack without anyone confirming the numbers are right. The pipeline behind it might have failed partway, picked up a stale vendor extract, or carried a broken join nobody has touched since the contractor who wrote it left. Analysts know this happens, so some quietly re-check the big numbers by hand before a report goes out, but there is no record that the check happened, no fixed list of what to check, and no way to prove it later when finance asks why the attendance figure in one deck does not match the one in another.
Product idea
A checklist tied to each scheduled report, listing the specific figures worth checking against a known source before it goes out: total revenue against the ticketing platform, attendance against the gate count, active members against the registration database. An analyst ticks each item, attaches a note or screenshot as evidence, and signs it with name and timestamp. Reports without a completed checklist show as unverified on a simple status list the whole data team can see. It does not check the pipeline itself and does not touch the report content. It only proves whether a person looked, and leaves the underlying data quality problem to whatever pipeline monitoring is already in place.
Who it is for
Insight and BI analysts who build the reports, the Head of data who has to explain a wrong number to the board, and analytics engineers who get asked to prove a figure was checked.
Possible first version
A single screen listing scheduled reports due to go out, each with a configurable checklist of figures to verify and where the correct answer lives. An analyst ticks items, adds an optional note or screenshot, and signs off with name and timestamp. A status list shows which reports are verified and which are not. Checklist items are configured manually by whoever owns the report. Version one does not connect to the BI tool's scheduler to hold an unverified report, and it does not pull comparison figures automatically from source systems: both the check and the entry are manual.
- Build classification
- Micro-tool
- Rough effort
- 10-day prototype
- Roles involved
- Insight and BI analyst, Head of data, Analytics engineer
- Relevant to
- Professional club, League office, Federation / governing body, Collegiate athletics
- Systems in play
- Business intelligence and visualisation tools, Cloud data warehouses and lakehouses, Messaging apps
- Product framing
- Verify or inspect
Questions we get asked
What do we need to have in place before this is useful?
Nothing beyond a list of the reports you already schedule and, for each one, the two or three figures worth checking and where the correct answer lives: someone's head, a source system, another dashboard. That list takes an afternoon to write down properly and is worth having even without the tool. There is no data migration and no pipeline access required to start. The checklist works from whatever the analyst can see on screen.
Does this replace our BI tool or the pipeline monitoring we already run?
No, it sits next to both. Your BI tool still builds and sends the report, and your pipeline monitoring still watches for failed jobs and stale sources. This only covers the gap between the two: the moment before a report leaves the building, when a person is meant to look at the headline numbers and often has nowhere to record that they did. Pipeline health and human verification are different questions with different failure modes.
Our analysts already glance at the numbers before sending. Why formalise it?
Because 'glanced at it' is not something you can show a board member six months later when a figure is challenged, and it is not consistent between analysts or under deadline pressure. The checklist takes about the same time as the glance already happening, it just fixes what gets checked and leaves a record. If a team genuinely checks the same things every time already, filling this in adds close to no time at all.
What happens if the send time arrives and nobody has completed the checklist?
In version one, nothing stops the report going out unverified. It simply shows as unverified on the status list, because holding a scheduled send needs access to your BI tool's scheduler, which is deliberately out of scope for a first build. What you get immediately is visibility: a Head of data can see every Monday which reports left the building unchecked, which is usually enough on its own to change behaviour before anyone builds an automatic hold.
Is this your workflow?
Tell us one sports workflow that still runs on paper, spreadsheets, WhatsApp or an outdated system. We will map it and show you what a simpler product looks like.
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