practice

Certified Report

A small set of reports explicitly endorsed as authoritative, with an owner and a review cadence, distinguished from everything else people have built.

Self-service reporting produces thousands of reports, most of them one-off, many abandoned, and several disagreeing with each other. The instinct to control creation is wrong — it removes the value of self-service and pushes people into spreadsheets, where there is no governance at all.

Certification governs authority rather than creation. Anyone may build anything. A small set is certified: this is the revenue report, it is owned by Finance Systems, it uses the agreed definitions from the semantic layer, it has been reviewed, and it is the one to cite in a board pack.

Certification is visible in the tool, so a user can tell in one glance whether what they are looking at is authoritative or somebody's exploration.

What makes it real is that the certified set is genuinely small, has a named owner per report, is re-reviewed on a schedule, and can lose certification when it drifts from the current definitions. What makes it fail is certifying two hundred reports as a tidying exercise, at which point the label means nothing and the two disagreeing revenue reports are both certified.