Could your team explain this without you?
Short on time? Here's the gist.
Documentation is cheaper than starting over
How a simple field created confusion across three departments
Could your team keep reporting if your data person left tomorrow?
Things that make you go hmmmm.
Documentation Is Cheaper Than Reconstruction.
Teams underestimate how much time they spend rebuilding what already existed. Recreating a report methodology, tracing why a field was renamed, or figuring out what a blank cell meant six months ago all cost people power. Time is a non-renewable resource.
When a funder or board member asks how a number was calculated, "Here is exactly how, and here is what we excluded and why" is a stronger position than a pause while someone skims through their inbox.
Field Notes
A Report Reasoning Scavenger Hunt
A youth services organization changed how it calculated program completion halfway through the year. The change lived in an email thread. When the next program report came due, the person who made the change had left, and the team spent two weeks reverse-engineering which years used which definition before they could report anything with confidence.
One Label Doing Three Jobs
A social services organization had a field labeled "Status" in three different systems, each populated by a different team and each meaning something slightly different. Intake used it to track eligibility. Case management used it to track housing placement. Finance used it to track billing. Nobody had written down which "Status" meant what, so reports pulling from different systems quietly contradicted each other.
A Bug or a Forgotten Rule?
A professional association's database had a workflow rule that automatically closed out records after 90 days of inactivity. It made sense when it was built, tied to bylaws that had since changed. Years later, staff assumed it was a data entry problem when active clients disappeared from reports, and spent weeks troubleshooting a rule that was working exactly as designed.
The Win the Lottery Checklist
If the person who manages your data left tomorrow, would your processes survive?
☐ Could someone find your definition of a key metric without asking a person?
☐ If two team members pulled the same report, would they get the same number?
☐ Does anyone know which spreadsheet, field, or system is the source of truth when two platforms disagree?
☐ Could someone other than the "data person" recreate your last board report without help?
☐ When a field's definition changed, is that change written down somewhere your team can find it?