Dashboard QA Checklist
May 2026 • Dashboarding • Data Quality
Use this checklist before sharing a marketing dashboard with channel owners, executives, or clients.
Summary
A dashboard is only useful when people trust the numbers and understand how to use it. This checklist focuses on the practical QA steps that make marketing dashboards clearer, safer, and easier to maintain, from metric logic and filters to permissions and stakeholder review.
Goal: make sure the dashboard is accurate, understandable, and hard to misuse.
1. Audience and Purpose
- Write the business question the dashboard should answer.
- Confirm the primary user and review cadence.
- Separate executive summary views from diagnostic analyst views.
- Remove charts that are interesting but not decision-useful.
2. Data and Metric Logic
- Confirm source tables, joins, filters, and date fields.
- Recalculate headline metrics outside the dashboard for a sample period.
- Check ratio metrics after aggregation, not row by row.
- Confirm nulls, duplicates, refunds, test data, and late-arriving data are handled intentionally.
3. Filters and Date Controls
- Test every filter value and default selection.
- Confirm filter interactions do not hide important context.
- Check date ranges against source data availability.
- Confirm month, week, and day definitions match team reporting standards.
4. Visual QA
- Confirm every title, axis, legend, and label uses plain business language.
- Check that colors are consistent across channels, products, and statuses.
- Avoid truncated labels, overlapping text, and tiny tables that require horizontal scrolling.
- Use notes or tooltips for metrics that are easy to misread.
5. Permissions and Sharing
- Open the dashboard as a stakeholder or viewer account.
- Confirm row-level security and workspace permissions.
- Check that embedded links, exports, and scheduled emails work.
- Confirm sensitive fields are hidden from audiences who should not see them.