Cleaning cohort definitions before you visualise anything
Beautiful charts built on muddy cohorts mislead faster than raw spreadsheets. Before Toolkitgardenhub draws a single board, we spend time naming who counts as VIP, which tickets are staff purchases, how returns reverse a line, and whether multi-store guests should be merged.
Hong Kong multi-brand houses often mix tourist tickets, local retainers, and corporate gifting in the same export. Without separating those intents, “average basket” becomes fiction. Agree the rules in a ninety-minute workshop, write them down, and refuse to proceed until the export can be filtered the same way twice.
Cohort hygiene also protects privacy conversations. When you know exactly which fields leave the till, you can strip identifiers for analysis while keeping advisor-facing views on the secure side of your house systems.
Only after those rules exist does visualisation help. Otherwise you decorate confusion.