Philippines staffing guide
Hand a Weekly Operations Report to an Assistant Without Losing the Numbers
A report handoff works when the source list, field dictionary, and variance commentary are separated before the assistant touches the spreadsheet.
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The Monday operations report looks simple until someone other than its author has to rebuild it. Columns arrive from a booking system, a finance export, and a hand-maintained sheet that only one manager understands. An assistant can own the assembly, but only if the chain of custody for each number is written down before the first draft. Otherwise the report becomes a weekly argument about whose figure is right.
Map every column to one owner and one system
List each column, the system it comes from, the person who can change that system, and the refresh time. Mark derived columns in a different color and show the formula in a comment. When two systems disagree, the report should keep both values and name the discrepancy rather than quietly choosing the friendlier one. This map is short, usually under a page, and it prevents most of the rebuild conversations that consume a Monday morning.
Freeze the field dictionary before the first run
Ambiguity hides in ordinary words. Does an active client mean anyone with an open contract, or anyone who logged work last month? Write the definition, the allowed values, and the treatment of blanks and duplicates. Keep the dictionary in the same folder as the template so a new assistant finds it without asking. When a definition changes, record the effective week so older reports can still be read in their original terms.
Separate calculation from commentary
Let the assistant complete the numbers and the structural checks, then hold a distinct review step where an owner writes the interpretation. A drop in volume might be a holiday, a migration, or a data feed that stopped on Wednesday. An assistant can flag all three possibilities with evidence, but the owner decides which explanation goes to leadership. Mixing the two steps encourages confident prose over an unverified figure.
Build a variance note for anything unusual
Any line that moves more than the agreed threshold gets a short note: what changed, when, which source confirmed it, and what is still unknown. The note travels with the report, not in a separate chat thread. Over several weeks these notes become the institutional memory of the account, and they reveal whether a recurring swing is seasonal, operational, or simply a broken export that nobody has fixed.
Reconcile before distributing, not after
Send the draft to one named reviewer with a five-item check: totals tie, week labels match, new clients are accounted for, exclusions are listed, and the source timestamps are inside the reporting window. The assistant attaches the reconciliation tab rather than pasting screenshots. If a check fails, the report waits for the corrected source instead of shipping with a footnote that the number is approximate.
Keep the working file under version control
Name the file with the reporting week and a revision letter, and keep one read-only copy of the version that was actually sent. Resist the urge to overwrite last week's file with this week's data. A manager who asks in November why October looked the way it did should be able to open the exact workbook that produced the slide, including the query date and the person who approved it.