1. Business goal
Write the business outcome in plain language. Examples: capture more qualified leads, reduce manual quote work, track service jobs, or give leadership a daily operations view.
2. Users
List every user group: customers, sales, operations, finance, admin, managers and external partners. Note what each group needs to create, view, approve or export.
3. Entities
Name the core records the system needs. Common examples include leads, contacts, companies, products, quotes, invoices, jobs, tasks, notes and files.
4. Workflows
Document the workflow from first trigger to final outcome. Include manual steps, approvals, notifications, retries and exception paths.
5. Source systems
List spreadsheets, CRMs, email inboxes, forms, payment tools and databases that currently hold useful data.
6. Reporting
Define the decisions the dashboard should support. Each report should have an owner, a cadence and a next action.
7. Launch constraints
Capture deadlines, access limitations, data cleanup needs, compliance concerns, budget range and who signs off before launch.