Most delays in dashboard commissions trace back to export hygiene, not design disagreement. Before you upload anything to our secure folder, run through this list with your IR technician.
Student identifiers should be hashed or removed; we need programme code, entry term, exit reason, and cumulative credits attempted. Dates must be ISO format — YYYY-MM-DD — not mixed locale strings.
Watch for duplicate rows where a student changed major mid-year. Collapse to one row per student per academic year or flag the transfer explicitly; otherwise retention denominators inflate.
Null values belong empty, not zero. A zero in a completion field reads as failure when the student is still enrolled.
Send a data dictionary even if it feels obvious. The column labelled STATUS in your SIS rarely matches what faculty assume it means.
We return a validation memo within three business days. Fix the rows flagged in red before we sketch a single chart — it saves two weeks downstream.