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