The day ends at suhoor

A dashboard closes its day at midnight, in whichever time zone was set when the account was opened, which usually means nobody set it.

For eleven months of the year that is a harmless convention. In the month expected to begin around the start of March it stops being harmless, because the customer's day no longer ends at midnight. It ends at the pre-dawn meal, four or five hours later, and most of what matters happens in between.

The evening opens, the orders come, the basket is the biggest it has been all year, and at midnight the report puts a line through the middle of the session. Half of one night is filed under Tuesday. The better half is filed under Wednesday, where it sits beside a dead daytime and disappears into an average.

So every daily number for a month is two halves of two different nights. Week on week is broken. Day of week is broken. The hour-of-day view is the only honest thing left on the screen, and hardly anybody opens it.

Then comes the expensive part, which is somebody acting on a soft-looking day. The campaign that was working gets turned off. The budget gets cut on the hour the customer was actually buying.

The repair is unglamorous and takes twenty minutes before the month starts. Set the account to the market's own time zone. Read the night as one block, sunset to the pre-dawn meal, rather than as a calendar day. Compare like nights, the second Friday against the second Friday. Then decide now, in daylight, which numbers are allowed to trigger a change at three in the morning. Almost none of them are.

The day ends at the pre-dawn meal. A report that does not know that will have somebody repairing what was never broken.