A five-section, working checklist for auditing donor, partner, and programme data before a reporting deadline forces the audit to happen the hard way. Pulled directly from the patterns covered in The Reconciliation Tax — go through it with your actual data open, not as a reading exercise.
What it covers
- Data Source Inventory — every place your data actually lives, and who owns each one
- Field Consistency — the mismatched names, date formats, and currencies that break reconciliation silently
- Duplicate Risk — where the same donor or partner is likely entered more than once
- Access & Security — whether sensitive records are actually restricted to the people who need them
- Reporting Readiness — how long it currently takes to produce one number you'd hand to a funder
How to use it
Print it or open it alongside your systems and go section by section. Unchecked boxes aren't a grade — they're a map of exactly where the reconciliation tax is building up, and where to start.