Reporting capability readiness checklist

Why run this

What this checklist is for

Most nonprofit reporting projects are sized for a team and inherited by one person. The design decision that matters is whether what gets built can be maintained by whoever is left holding it.

This checklist is deliberately about sustainability rather than sophistication. A modest report somebody can change beats an elegant one nobody can touch.

Run it with

Executive director or finance lead

And with

Whoever will actually build and maintain the reports

And with

A programme manager who will use them

The checklist

20 checks, in the order we would run them

Tick only what you can genuinely evidence today. An item you intend to do is not an item you have done, and scoring yourself generously here only produces a comfortable number and an uncomfortable project.

Section 1

Foundations

What must be true before any report is worth building.

Expenditure is coded to programme and funding source at entryIf it is reallocated afterwards, no reporting layer can fix it. This is a finance process change, not a Power BI task.
A single definition exists for programme, and it is written downDepartments using the word differently will produce reports that disagree and nobody will be able to explain why.
Nonprofit licensing has been checked within the last twelve monthsProgramme terms, your headcount and your entity structure all change. Organizations that checked three years ago are usually leaving something.
Source systems can export or connect reliably, on a scheduleA manual export that somebody has to remember is a dependency, not a data source.
Somebody is named as accountable for the reporting, even part-timeNot a committee. Reporting with no owner degrades within two quarters.

Section 2

Building for one person

The decisions that determine maintainability.

All shared calculations live in the semantic model, not in individual reportsReport-level measures exist only in that report and cannot be changed safely by anybody except their author.
A proper date table exists, marked as such, with your financial yearAutomatic date handling produces incorrect period comparisons for any organization without a calendar year end.
Fields and measures are named in plain languageThe model is read by non-specialists and increasingly by AI. Business-friendly naming is a functional requirement, not polish.
Measure descriptions are populatedThey document the model for the next person and they are what Copilot reads when answering questions against it.
Refresh runs at a frequency you can actually sustainDaily is sufficient for almost all nonprofit reporting and considerably easier to maintain than anything faster.

Section 3

Serving your audiences

Three audiences with genuinely different needs.

Separate views exist for board, staff and fundersA single dashboard for everybody is too detailed for trustees and too shallow for programme managers.
Funder reporting can be produced without manual assemblyIf a quarterly report still takes two people a week, the reporting has not solved the problem it was built for.
Every outcome figure displays its denominator and response rateA 70% improvement among 30% of participants is a different claim. Making this automatic protects your credibility.
Reports can be shared without giving people edit accessPublish through an app with audiences rather than sharing the workspace.
Sensitive participant data is protected by role, not by conventionAccess enforced by the system rather than assumed by policy.

Section 4

Sustaining it

What happens when the person who built it is unavailable.

Documentation exists and is stored where the next person will find itNot on the current analyst's drive. Definitions, sources, refresh schedule and known limitations.
A second person can perform a routine change following the documentationTest this rather than assuming it. It is the single most revealing check on this list.
Usage is reviewed and unopened reports are retiredMost estates carry a long tail nobody opens. Retiring them reduces maintenance for no loss.
A support route exists for when something breaksWhether internal, a partner, or a community. Deciding during an outage is worse.
The build was scoped to what one person can maintainAmbition is not the constraint here. Sustainability is.

What your score means

Read this against the number above

These bands are deliberately blunt. The middle band is where most organizations honestly sit, and it is a perfectly reasonable place to proceed from — provided the gaps are written down with owners rather than carried as optimism.

0–59%Significant gaps

Do not proceed yet. More than four in ten items are unaddressed, and the ones that fail here are usually the foundational ones that make everything after them harder.

60–84%Mostly ready, with known gaps

Proceed on a defined scope, with the outstanding items written into the plan as risks with owners and dates. This is the most common honest position.

85–100%Ready

The remaining gaps are small enough to handle during delivery rather than before it. Confirm the unticked items are genuinely minor rather than simply unexamined.

Your score highlights automatically as you tick items above. Nothing is saved, sent or tracked — refreshing the page clears it.

Closing the gaps

If you could not tick these, start here

The four items below are the ones whose absence causes the most trouble downstream. If your unticked items include any of these, they are worth addressing before the rest.

Expenditure coded after the fact

Fix this in finance before building reports. It is the foundation and no amount of reporting logic compensates.

Report-level measures

Move them into the model. This is the difference between an estate that survives a staff change and one that does not.

No documentation test

Ask a second person to make a change from the documentation alone. Whatever they cannot do is what you need to write down.

Licensing not checked

Do it this month. Nonprofit entitlements are substantial and routinely under-claimed, and the check takes a morning.

Want a second opinion on your score?

We will review your licence position and your reporting requirements together, and design something sized for the person who will actually maintain it — including telling you where you need less than you thought.

Talk through your result Read the related guides We reply to every message within one business day.

Keep going

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What this checklist is for

Run it with

And with

And with

20 checks, in the order we would run them

Foundations

Building for one person

Serving your audiences

Sustaining it

Read this against the number above

If you could not tick these, start here

Expenditure coded after the fact

Report-level measures

No documentation test

Licensing not checked

Want a second opinion on your score?

Related checklists

Year-end close readiness checklist

Donor and supporter data protection audit

Tell us what you're trying to fix

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