Walkthrough of a weak report

Demo course: the video for this lesson is not recorded yet. The full narration is written out below, so the lesson is complete to work through as a reading.

The report under review

One tab. Every open opportunity. Columns for account, owner, amount, stage and close date. A total in the bottom-right corner. It looks tidy, and that is the problem — it looks finished.

What the teardown finds

• Three deals make up 61% of the total, so the headline number is really a bet on three conversations. The report never says so.
• Eleven deals have close dates in the past. They are still counted in the period total.
• Two accounts appear twice under slightly different names, so one deal is counted twice.
• Stage names come straight from the CRM ('Stage 4'), which means nothing to a reader outside the sales team.
• There is no week-over-week comparison, so no one can see movement — the single most useful signal in the file.

The rewrite

The fixed version leads with the period total, the delta since last week, and a line stating that the top three deals carry most of the value. Past-dated deals are pulled into their own block labelled 'needs a new date'. Duplicates are merged with a note on what was merged. Stage names are rewritten in plain language.

Nothing was deleted to make the number look better. That is the rule that separates cleaning from hiding.