Merchant report creator

• Status: Backlog, opened 2026-08-27. Nothing built, nothing sequenced.
• Issue: None yet. Per project-creation, an item gets a GitHub issue when the work is actually intended rather than on sight, and this is backlog.
• Launch plan: UNDECIDED, and deliberately not guessed. See "Which launch plan row is this?" below.

What is this?

A surface where a merchant pulls the data they want, rather than reading the numbers we chose for them.

• Her words, from the 2026-08-24 survey input: "we need to build a report creator so merchants can actually pull data they want".
• Restated on 2026-08-27 as a separate page rather than part of the dashboard: "for merchant, the dashboard should be closer to what admin has, then they would have their own analytics page to get reports, etc".
• So the split she wants is: the dashboard answers "how am I doing", and this answers "let me go and look".

It is survey item HERS 5, which the survey itself refused to design.

• design-survey.md, section "What did she already name?", item HERS 5. Its instruction was to scope and not design, so it drew three options and stopped.
• The three options live there and are NOT copied here, because a second copy is a copy that drifts: a fixed catalogue of prepared reports, a guided builder over a bounded metric set, or scheduled digests instead of an interactive builder.

The query console is its ancestor, not its neighbour.

• The survey says it directly: a merchant report creator is the admin BigQuery workspace at /admin/analytics/bigquery with a safe query surface instead of raw SQL.
• That workspace is being worked right now as task 1 of the 2026-08-27 agenda, #958: feat(admin/analytics): promote Query Console to its own surface and teach it to query Firestore. Saved queries, a result table and a meta strip already exist there.
• Practical consequence: this project starts by reading what the query console became, not from a blank page.

The hard part is the privacy gate, not the interface.

• The survey's own warning on the guided-builder option: the k-anonymity gate on every cell is the difficulty, and the UI is not.
• A merchant pulling arbitrary cuts of venue data is exactly the shape that leaks a small cohort. A quiet venue, a narrow date range and one dimension too many resolves to a single person.
• #874: design(privacy): one data-classification and egress policy, before search, the assistant, and the apps platform each invent their own is the open Prototype P0 that would answer this once rather than having this project invent a fifth ad hoc answer.

What is the current state?

Backlog. Raised, given a home, and not sequenced.

• Only this README exists. No planning.md, no design.md, nothing built.
• It was split out of merchant-and-venue-dashboards on 2026-08-27 because the survey called it its own project and the operator confirmed it as a separate page.

What would promote it out of backlog.

• Her word that it is intended work, which is what mints the issue.
• Realistically also: the query console settling, since this builds on what that becomes, and a read on #874 so the k-anonymity gate is not invented here.

Which launch plan row is this?

Open question for the operator, not an assumption.

• Candidate A: ALPHA.md row "Merchant-side dashboards", P1, In progress, currently citing #320. Already owned by merchant-and-venue-dashboards, so pointing a second project at it repeats the one-issue-two-rows problem.
• Candidate B: no row at all, because a report creator may be post-Alpha. #320 is a Phase 3 item with unmet Phase 1 and Phase 2 dependencies, which is evidence for this reading.
• Candidate C: a new row, which is not this skill's decision to make.
• Nothing is written into the launch plan until she picks.

What else is related?

• #320: Phase 3: Venue analytics, aggregate interest and vibe insights for merchants, where merchant-facing aggregate analytics already lives.
• #958: feat(admin/analytics): promote Query Console to its own surface and teach it to query Firestore, the admin ancestor of this surface.
• #874: design(privacy): one data-classification and egress policy, before search, the assistant, and the apps platform each invent their own, which should answer the k-anonymity question once.
• #167: Merchant: Community Portal & Tools, surfaced during consolidation. Adjacent rather than the same thing, and not claimed here.