Larry David would argue that I’m on the cusp of being too late to say this, but let me begin by wishing you all a Happy New Year! 2025 was an exciting year for all of us at South Shore Analytics. We grew our team, we started a Newsletter, and we’ve been fortunate to make many new friends and connections.

For this week’s edition we wanted to take a moment to touch on something that is likely topical for many of you at the moment - New Year Planning. Almost every business goes through this exercise, and for very good reason. In our experience, however, we often see teams make the mistake of setting goals and targets without first asking the question of whether they have the infrastructure in place to track the data, or determine how confident they are in its accuracy.

Imagine setting a goal to run a faster mile time, only to later find out that your only measurement tool was a stopwatch that randomly added or subtracted time. Makes no sense! Don’t fall into the same trap with your data - before the year picks up speed, it’s worth doing a quick, honest audit.

Why this week is the moment

January is one of the only times of year where you can still change the shape of things to come before plans and initiatives have begun to settle. Budgets are in motion, priorities are being negotiated, and teams are deciding which initiatives get oxygen and which ones quietly fade into the background.

If your reporting is messy, this is also the best time to set a plan in motion to fix it. We all know that buy-in on data initiatives can be tricky, but when your recommendations align with broader company objectives (i.e. we need to clean up our data modeling or there’s no way we’ll reliably know whether we hit our new customer target) it’s a much easier sell. For this reason, we recommend beginning with a brief data audit.

The January data audit checklist (10 yes/no questions)

This is intentionally not a super nerdy scoring model. It’s meant to be fast, slightly uncomfortable, and useful.

Give yourself 1 point for “yes,” 0 for “no.”. If you catch yourself saying “well, it depends,” that’s usually a “no” wearing a clever disguise.

  1. Speed: Can you answer “How many active customers do we have?” in under five minutes, with confidence?
  2. Definition: Is “active customer” defined in writing somewhere that people actually use, not just in one person’s head?
  3. Consistency: If Finance and Ops pull “revenue” for last month, do they land on the same number without a group therapy session?
  4. Reconciliation: Do your core reports reconcile back to source systems (orders, revenue, ad spend) within an agreed tolerance?
  5. Freshness: Do you know how fresh your key tables are right now, and do you get alerted when something is late?
  6. Lineage: Can you trace a KPI on a dashboard back to the underlying source fields without guessing or reverse engineering your own work?
  7. Ownership: Does each critical pipeline have a clear owner and a clear definition of what “broken” means?
  8. Change control: When metric logic changes, do you version and document it, or does it silently drift until someone notices in a board meeting?
  9. Self-serve: Can the right stakeholders answer common questions without needing to DM the one analyst who knows where the bodies are buried?
  10. Resilience: If an upstream system or connector fails, do you notice quickly and have a plan, or do you find out because a dashboard is blank during the Monday review?

If you want an optional bonus question that tends to separate “we have data” from “we run the company with data,” add this one:

Bonus: Do you know what your stack costs per month (warehouse, ingestion, BI), and whether that cost has drifted as the year went on?

Scoring guide (the brutally honest version)

  • 8-10 yes: You have a solid foundation. That doesn’t mean you are done, it just means you get to spend 2026 optimizing instead of constantly triaging.
  • 5-7 yes: You can operate, but you are paying a tax for it. It shows up as time spent debating numbers, re-running the same analysis, and building “one-off” reports that never quite die.
  • 0-4 yes: This is urgent. Not because you are failing, but because your planning process is going to be built on a shaky instrument panel, and it is hard to drive fast when you do not trust the speedometer.

A line I come back to a lot is this: if you are below a 7, you are not “bad at data.” You are just likely to spend an uncomfortable amount of your year arguing about what is true, instead of collaborating on what to do next.

What to do with your score (without turning this into homework)

If you scored 8-10, pick one thing that annoys you every month and fix it now. Maybe it’s freshness alerts, maybe it’s metric definitions, maybe it’s reducing the number of dashboards that exist purely out of tradition. You don’t need a vast overhaul, you just need one meaningful improvement that will compound over 12 months.

If you scored 5-7, don’t panic! Pick the two “no” answers that cause the most pain, and focus there. In our experience, the highest-leverage fixes tend to be boring things like standardizing definitions, setting up reconciliation routines, and putting basic monitoring in place so surprises stop ambushing you.

If you scored 0-4, resist the temptation to start with prettier dashboards. A clean dashboard sitting on unreliable logic is like a freshly painted house with a cracked foundation. Start with the unglamorous core: definitions, a source-of-truth model, and basic reliability. Once those are in place, the dashboards basically build themselves.

Resources (if you want to go deeper)

If you want a little more structure behind this, here are a few things we’ve put together that may help:

CTA

If you do the checklist and you’re below 7, reply to this newsletter and tell me your score. We’ll send you our extended diagnostic template, and if you include the two questions you answered “no” on, I’ll send back a quick note on where I’d start if I were in your seat.

Thanks for reading! Want more? Check out our blog and our YouTube channel for deeper dives and walkthroughs. We’ll be back each week with more content - subscribe to stay in the loop.

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