Manual reporting

Sometimes the most advanced reporting move is ... Excel.

Export the list.
Sort it how you wish.
Scroll line by line.
Ask, "Does this person belong here? Why, or why not?"

It feels primitive.
Inefficient, even.

But it's not.

That tedious manual review is where you discover the outliers:

The lapsed-but-returned member.
The free trial.
The deceased contact who happened to meet the other criteria.

That manual review is not busywork.
It's definition work.

And until you've wrestled with those edge cases manually, you don't actually know what report you're trying to build.

Here's the thing:

The spreadsheet phase isn't a failure of your CRM -- or of your skills.

It's a critical step in clarifying what you actually want.

All the best,
A.