Design a daily report with statuses you can verify

Before automating a daily report, decide which actions the team will take from it. Those might include assigning a stalled task, sending a change for review, or checking missing information. We suggest the structure below for that purpose. It does not imply that connections are configured or that collection and delivery are already running.

1. Start with decisions and sources

Give each section a question to answer. “What is ready for acceptance?” needs evidence of completion and a review status. “What needs intervention?” needs a description of the interruption and an owner. Leave out measures that provide no clear basis for a next action.

List the sources and the rules for obtaining information. Identify the data owner, acceptable update delay, and a way to inspect the underlying record. Check connection options for each system separately. Naming a system in a diagram does not establish that an integration exists.

2. Organize the report into four sections

The changes section should list events within the agreed period using precise states, such as completed and awaiting review. The errors section should show where a process stopped and who is investigating. Distinguish a failure in the work from a failure to retrieve information about that work.

The missing data section should identify unavailable or outdated information and the conclusions affected by it. Use the final section for actions: what needs doing, who owns it, and the agreed due point. Do not generate a deadline automatically when the rule for setting one has not been discussed.

3. Show freshness beside the status

Put the reporting period and document creation time in the header. Record the last successful update for each source separately. A report created today can contain older information. Readers need that distinction to avoid treating a previous state as the current one.

Use different states for “no new events,” “data not received,” and “source not connected.” An empty response does not establish that everything is working. Keep the supporting record, event or update time, and owner beside each status. If the evidence cannot be checked, mark the line for clarification.

4. Review the template before automating it

Fill in the structure manually with test data first. Plan checks for an ordinary update, an unavailable source, an outdated record, and a delivery failure. Agree on how the team will learn that the report itself was not generated. That notice needs a named recipient and an action.

If AI writes a summary, retain a checkable source record for every conclusion. Limit its input to the agreed information. The summary should preserve unknown states and should not rank people by the number of report entries. These are proposed checks, with no claim that the future automation has already passed them.

WGP develops and supports online stores. A report about store work can be scoped as a separate task after sources, rules, and responsibilities are agreed. This structure does not claim ready-made integrations or an automated reporting feature in Frontbox.

5. A checklist for the first template

• Choose the decisions the report will support.
• Identify sources and evidence for each status.
• Separate creation time from data freshness.
• Define missing and unavailable data states.
• Assign an owner to each action.
• Prepare collection and delivery checks with test data.

Start with three statuses the team needs to understand every day. For each one, record the evidence required and the action a reader should take after seeing it.