Kick off every board KPI with a one-pager: business definition, numeric grain (day/invoice/customer), include/exclude rules, and owner. Only then open CALCULATE.
Alignment checklist
- Currency: transactional, functional, or constant currency — and which FX rate table/date.
- Fiscal vs calendar: which Date table is marked, and does DATESYTD respect fiscal year columns?
- Acceptance test: three sample filters (region, period, product) with expected values from the ERP/GL extract.
How disagreement shows up in DAX
Vague “net sales” becomes FILTER fights inside CALCULATE, or REMOVEFILTERS sprinkled until the card matches last month’s Excel. Prefer explicit measures (Net Sales excl. intercompany) over one mega-measure with optional parameters. Use field parameters for legitimate alternate views — not duplicated measures with suffixes _v2. Capture a Performance Analyzer trace on the contested card before arguing about DAX style.
Sign-off rule: no production publish until the acceptance-test filters return numbers within tolerance versus the ERP SQL for those three cases. If Mark as date table is missing, reject any DATESYTD / SAMEPERIODLASTYEAR in the measure set until the Date dimension is fixed.