A dashboard that breaks during close week is worse than no dashboard at all. Controllers lose trust instantly when a variance figure shifts between Tuesday's review and Thursday's board prep.
Our pre-close checklist covers source freshness timestamps, reconciliation to the general ledger trial balance, handling of late journal entries, FX conversion consistency, and explicit flags for provisional versus finalized numbers.
Each item gets a named owner and a pass/fail mark in a shared log. We keep this log in a simple spreadsheet for the first three close cycles, then migrate sign-off into the dashboard footer once the process stabilizes.
Surprises usually come from three places: manual CSV uploads someone forgot to refresh, a CRM opportunity stage change that reclassified revenue, or a new cost center mapping that nobody told the analytics team about.
Build the checklist before you build the charts. Controllers who own the verification process own the dashboard long after external help ends.