From CSV chaos to a clean deliverable

The painful part of spreadsheet work is rarely the final chart or the final table. It is the cleanup nobody sees.

Headers drift. Dates arrive in three formats. Currency values turn into strings. Someone exports a report with totals baked into the middle of the file and calls it done.

That is why a useful workflow starts with structure before it starts with analysis.

The fastest way to lose time is to jump into formulas before the raw data has been normalized. The fastest way to earn time back is to make the first pass mechanical: fix the schema, clean the categories, remove the junk rows, and document the assumptions. Once that work is stable, the actual reporting becomes predictable.

statboy is designed to make that first pass repeatable, so the deliverable gets cleaner while the process gets less fragile.