What must be agreed before a reporting project can produce a useful view?

Five things for every metric on the page: the specific business decision it supports, the person who owns that decision, the authoritative system of record, the exact inclusion and exclusion rules (such as VAT, shipping, cancellations and spam leads), and the refresh schedule. Putting those five items into a one-page measure dictionary settles 90% of reporting disputes before build work starts.

Why do CRM and GA4 lead numbers never match to the exact unit?

GA4 measures browser events from visitors who accepted analytics cookies, whereas your CRM stores contact records regardless of cookie choice and after spam or duplicate filtering. They are supposed to differ slightly. For a deeper look at how to handle that gap, read our guide on what to do when GA4 and your order system disagree.

When should we repair tracking instead of building a new report?

If the system that owns the metric is recording false events (such as a form trigger firing on failed button clicks or eCommerce orders counting twice), building a dashboard on top of it will only display bad numbers faster. Fix the collection fault first, or mark that specific metric as under repair while building the rest of the report from your verified order and finance records.

Before you build another dashboard, define the decision it has to support

Tired of dashboards that nobody trusts or uses? Why agreeing a plain-English measure dictionary across GA4, CRM and finance comes before building charts.

Before you build another dashboard, define the decision it has to support

Whenever a leadership team gets frustrated that marketing's numbers don't match sales' numbers, and neither of them matches finance's management accounts, someone eventually suggests building a new dashboard. In our experience, commissioning a new Looker Studio or Power BI dashboard before agreeing what the numbers mean only gives you a faster, more colourful way to have the exact same argument. **A dashboard is not a source of truth; it is just a window onto whatever definitions and data sources sit underneath it.** ## Why three departments can report three different numbers and all be right When marketing, sales and finance walk into a Monday morning trading meeting with three different totals for last month, the instinct is to ask whose spreadsheet is broken. In our experience, none of them is broken. They are simply answering three different questions from three different systems: - **Web analytics (GA4)** measures browser behaviour at the moment a checkout or form is submitted on the website. - **The Sales CRM** measures pipeline enquiries, quotes issued and contracts signed by the sales team. - **Finance** measures net invoiced revenue once goods have been dispatched, exc