The Dashboard Metric on Board-Pack Eve
On the day before a quarterly board pack is due, an analyst notices that the “active customer” dashboard uses a 30-day login definition, while the finance report uses a 90-day paid-transaction definition. The board slide cites 12,400 active customers. Under the finance definition the figure is 9,800. The analyst who built the dashboard left three months ago. Your VP has already seen the 12,400 number and referenced it in an email to the CEO. The board pack is due at 9 a.m. tomorrow; the data team can rerun either metric in about two hours. No one has asked for a reconciliation.
1. What do you do before 9 a.m.?
Read the worked answer
The gap is 2,600 customers, about 21% of the higher figure. That is material enough that I would not let the number stand without a label and an owner. I would treat this as a definition and disclosure problem, not a query bug to fix silently.
Sequence:
- Ask the data team to rerun both definitions and capture the SQL and row counts. Two hours is feasible; I would start immediately.
- Ask finance to confirm which definition the board has seen historically and which one supports the paid-transaction view.
- Brief the VP before the pack is finalized. I would say: the 12,400 figure uses a login definition that differs from finance's; the finance-consistent figure is 9,800; here is the footnote and the corrected slide.
- Update the slide to 9,800 with a clear definition footnote, or present both figures side by side if the board needs the engagement view. Do not average them or choose the higher number because it was already circulated.
- If the pack is already locked, send an erratum to the CEO's chief of staff before 9 a.m. and offer to walk through it.
The judgment is that transparency before the meeting is cheaper than a correction during or after it.
2. How do you prevent a repeat without turning this into a blame exercise?
Read the worked answer
I would fix the system, not the departed analyst. The root cause is that two teams own two definitions with no shared metric layer and no reconciliation check.
Actions:
- Create a one-page metric dictionary for board-facing measures: active customer, paid customer, churn, and revenue. Each entry gets an owner, a definition, a source table, and a refresh cadence.
- Assign joint ownership to finance and data, with finance as the sign-off for any board metric.
- Add an automated reconciliation test that compares dashboard totals to the finance ledger at each month-end and flags differences above an agreed threshold, for example 2%.
- Require a change log for metric definitions and a named approver when a definition changes.
- Add a pre-board checklist item: every external number has a definition footnote and a finance confirmation.
I would present this as a control gap discovered before an error reached the board, and recognize the analyst who raised it. Punishing the messenger would make the next discrepancy surface later and cost more.