Stop sending reports the practice no longer uses

What this means for your practice

Retire the schedule, subscriptions and dependent links as a controlled change. Tell intended recipients where the replacement can be found and who owns it.

A practical conversation with your supplier

Ask the supplier to follow the next scheduled cycle in a test setup after retirement. Who would still receive the old version? Explain where the replacement lives and any definition changes. Check spreadsheets or meetings that rely on the old distribution before declaring the transition complete.

Plan the first improvement

Before stopping a report, find out how people use it. An email may feed a spreadsheet, a recurring meeting pack or another team's work, even if its original sponsor no longer reads it. Confirm which uses move to the replacement and whether its definitions differ. Tell recipients how to recognise the final old version and where the current information will be maintained. Ask the supplier to check scheduled sends, subscriptions and any automated uses in other tools, with their owners involved.

Archive historical material according to the organisation's decisions rather than deleting it merely to make the new report easier to find. Test the next scheduled cycle and a saved link. Both should behave as intended without producing competing current figures. In the following review, look for references to the retired report in working documents. These often reveal a missed dependency that would not have been found by switching off the original email schedule alone.

How to check the result

Track obsolete reports still produced or referenced.