reporting — the standing artifact that ships itself

A report is a push artifact: a fixed snapshot that lands in someone's inbox or shared drive on a cadence, the same shape every period, with no human assembling it. That is the whole job. If a human opens a live view to slice numbers themselves, that is pull — a dashboard, not a report. Hold that line; almost every failed "reporting" project is a dashboard wearing a report's name, or a report nobody can trust because the numbers went stale and no one noticed.

Your deliverable is a runnable pipeline, not advice: a template, a generation script, a schedule, and a delivery step, with a freshness gate so it fails loud instead of shipping yesterday's numbers.

Step 0 — Write the report contract (no contract, no build)

Before any code, pin six fields. An undefined audience is a report no one reads; an undefined source is a number no one can defend.