Cleaning Your Data Before You Clean Your Reports

The dashboard reflex

When the numbers look wrong, the instinct is to build a better report. But the report is downstream of the data. Polish a dashboard built on messy data and you've just made a prettier lie.

The order that works

1. Consolidate — get every source of truth into one place
2. Dedupe — remove the redundancies that create reconciliation drift
3. Standardize — one definition per metric, enforced at the source
4. Maintain — documented procedures, not heroics
5. Then build the dashboard

Why this order

Every step skipped here becomes a manual fix every month. Done once, in sequence, the dashboard you build on top actually stays trustworthy — and the team stops arguing about which number is right.