# Validation checklist — before you share a summary
Floor Read free starter | Version 1.0

1. Define the report period and time zone explicitly. Do not let a filename, the current date or a future promise date decide the report day.
2. Check that required columns exist. Read dates and numeric fields; stop on values you cannot interpret consistently.
3. Check the unique record key. A duplicate shipment ID needs review, not automatic deletion.
4. For repeated order IDs, confirm the order timestamp agrees. A split shipment is a second shipment, not a second order.
5. Select rows using the agreed ship date and report-day boundary. Record the selected row count.
6. Reject shipment times earlier than order times. In this practice exercise, reject missing, negative or nonnumeric shipping costs.
7. Recalculate totals from the selected rows. Use distinct orders for shipping cost per order; do not substitute the shipment count.
8. For this exercise only, calculate each order's time to its earliest selected shipment, then take the median of those order-level hours.
9. With no selected rows, report zero counts and leave ratios and elapsed-time summaries blank with a reason.
10. Keep definitions next to results. Shipping cost is not total fulfillment cost. Time to the earliest selected shipment is not full-order completion.
11. Do not infer labor productivity, profitability, late orders, trends or causes from fields that are absent.
12. Give each unresolved question an owner role. Recheck the answer after new information arrives.

Practice answer: 4 shipments; 3 orders; $41 shipping cost; $13.67 per order rounded; per-order hours 2, 21 and 11; median 11 hours.
This answer applies only to fictional-shipments.csv, not to an unknown real export.