Looker Studio Reporting Issue — 2026-01-30

Overview

During the weekly end-of-week leadership call, Ben flagged that a Reynolds Transfer contact had complained about receiving automated Looker Studio reports showing data from two years prior. Investigation revealed the report had been configured with a fixed date range rather than a rolling "last 30 days" window — meaning the client had been receiving stale January 2022 data for an extended period without anyone catching it.

The incident exposed a systemic gap: automated client-facing reports were going out without any internal review step.

What Happened

Reynolds Transfer's contact reported receiving Looker Studio reports dated approximately two years in the past.
The root cause was a misconfigured date range — the report used a static date rather than a dynamic/relative range.
The client had apparently been deleting or ignoring the reports rather than escalating, so the issue went undetected internally for a long time.

"She'd been getting the same report for like January of 2022 for years." — Mark Hope

Decision: 4-Day Internal Preview Rule

As a direct result of this incident, a new standard process was established for all automated client reports:

Any automated report sent to a client must also be sent to an internal team member 4 days before the client receives it.

This gives the account manager or responsible team member time to review the content, verify the data looks correct, and catch configuration errors before the client sees them.

Mark's framing:

"It's really dangerous to have a report automatically go to a client that you haven't looked at. The client's going to call you up and go, 'hey, what the hell is this?' And you're going to go, 'I don't know.'"

Action Items

[ ] Melissa to brief all Account Managers on the Looker Studio issue and the new 4-day internal preview requirement
[ ] All AMs to audit their existing Looker Studio automations and verify date ranges are dynamic (not fixed)
[ ] Ben to reconfigure the Reynolds Transfer report with a rolling date range and set up the 4-day internal preview automation

Broader Implications

This issue prompted a wider call to audit all automated client-facing outputs — not just Looker Studio reports. The principle applies to any scheduled or triggered communication sent to clients without a human review step in the workflow.

See also: ^[1] (if created) and ^[2] for broader Reynolds Transfer context.

^[3] — source meeting where this was raised
^[2] — Reynolds Transfer client overview