The Dashboard Nobody Trusted

When finance keeps a shadow spreadsheet next to the official dashboard, the spreadsheet is usually right.

I find one in a lot of platform reviews. Finance stopped trusting the revenue dashboard months ago, so someone rebuilds the number by hand every month. Nobody announced it. The dashboard stayed up, and people kept screenshotting it for slides.

When I trace these back, the cause is rarely dramatic. A refund logic change that never made it into the model. A currency conversion done on the wrong date. A filter someone added for one report and forgot.

What keeps it broken is ownership. The data team thinks finance owns the definition. Finance thinks the data team owns the dashboard. So the fix sits in the gap for months.

To get out of it:

1. Put the spreadsheet and the dashboard side by side and find the first line where they differ.
2. Pick one owner for the metric, by name, from the business side.
3. Retire the spreadsheet in public, once the numbers match for two closes in a row.

Retiring it is the hard part. People keep the spreadsheet because it has saved them before.

Sounds like your finance team? Tell me about it, or grab a slot: https://cal.com/thomasnys/30min?utm_source=linkedin&utm_content=dashboard-nobody-trusted