Reporting latency: what to get right first

Every audit we run turns up some version of this. If you only fix one thing about reporting latency this quarter, make it the first item below.

Numbers get quoted in meetings long after anyone remembers how they were calculated. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

Start here

Decide how fresh reports genuinely need to be. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

Then this

Real-time costs several times more than hourly. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

Eventually

Most decisions do not need same-minute data. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

In practice

Data outlives the applications built on top of it, which is why the model deserves more thought than the screens. Three things worth confirming about reporting latency before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Real-time costs several times more than hourly — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.