Metric Definitions Document Template

A metric definition is not a sentence. Two teams can implement the same agreed wording faithfully and still put different numbers on the same slide. The wording never said which of a record's several timestamps anchors it to a period, or whether a day with no orders is a zero or is absent. Those are not details. Each one changes the figure, and each one is missing from almost every definition ever written in prose.

So the register carries seven fields per metric rather than a description: the aggregation, the expression, the population filter, the timestamp that dates a row, the grain, what an empty period reads as, and the source of record. dbt's metric spec asks for each of them as a separate key, because a semantic layer cannot compute a number until all seven are decided. Google publishes what the aggregation field alone is worth: a plain sum over a joined order table returns 80.00 where the shipping collected was 30.00.

And the register is only half of it. What each report actually computes is read out of the report into its own sheet and never edited to match, so a metrics doc describing a world your reports do not implement becomes a list of rows instead. Send River whatever publishes a number and it names the one field a disagreement turns on. For a single pair that has to be settled before a meeting today, the report reconciliation does that instead, and the template library has the sheets blank.