The dashboard's weekend

The reporting tool thinks today is the weekend, and it thought yesterday was a working day.

Its week runs Monday to Sunday. Its weekend is Saturday and Sunday. Its day-of-week chart puts those two at the far right, faded, where the eye reads them as the quiet end of something.

Here the working week ends on a Thursday, and this week it ended on Wednesday in Cairo, because Labour Day fell on the Thursday. Riyadh worked its normal Sunday to Thursday stretch. Neither of those weeks is the one on the screen.

A weekly budget therefore resets on a Monday, one day into a working week that started here on Sunday. The two days the tool has marked as its weekend are one of our days off followed by one of our busiest working mornings. A seven-day rolling average always holds one region's weekend and half of another's. A week-on-week comparison drawn on a Monday morning sets a whole local week against a partial one, and does it politely, in the same colour, every week.

Then the chart says Friday underperforms. Cost per result higher, conversion rate lower, and a recommendation forms in the room: take the budget out of Friday. Sometimes that is right. Often the Friday number is low because half the region is at a family lunch and the other half is at work, and the tool has averaged the two into one bar.

The day-of-week chart is reporting a calendar that was drawn somewhere else. Pace to it and you are pacing to another region's week, and the account pays for the translation quietly, at both ends of every reporting week.