Before you invest in reporting latency

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. Before you spend anything on reporting latency, it is worth confirming a few things are already true.

Most data problems are ownership problems that turned into technical ones. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

Prerequisites

• You can describe the outcome you want in one sentence
• Someone owns it after the work is done
• Decide how fresh reports genuinely need to be
• You have a way to tell whether it worked

Common failure modes

Real-time costs several times more than hourly. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

Most decisions do not need same-minute data. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

In practice

Numbers get quoted in meetings long after anyone remembers how they were calculated. Three things worth confirming about reporting latency before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Decide how fresh reports genuinely need to be — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.