Why nobody in the room
trusts the dashboard.
When the CEO gets three revenue numbers from three tools, the problem is rarely the charting, it starts further down. Four patterns we find in almost every reporting audit.
01TRUTH
Three tools, three revenue numbers
The CRM says one number, billing says another, and the board deck, assembled by hand on Sunday night, says a third. Every meeting starts with reconciliation instead of decisions.
02FIELDS
Reports built on fields nobody fills
Close dates set to the last day of the quarter, blank amount fields, deals that jump from stage one to closed-won. Every chart downstream inherits the gaps, and everyone quietly knows it.
03DEFINITIONS
"Qualified" means five different things
Sales, marketing and finance never agreed what a stage, an SQL or ARR actually means. So the forecast roll-up is an argument, not a number, and no dashboard can fix a definition problem.
04SPRAWL
Fifty dashboards, zero answers
Every question spawned another report, nobody retired the old ones, and now nobody knows which view is current. So the team exports to spreadsheets, and the CRM stops being the source of truth.