Course 6 · The sample portfolio

Every skill here is easier to learn on data you cannot damage. That is what this course gives you.

Lesson one. After this you can say what the estate holds. This is Northwind Trading, a fictional company: contracts, renewals, delivered reports. A trial starts with it loaded; an empty workspace loads it from the dashboard.

Lesson two is a guided wander, starting with the contracts. The goal: learn the shape of a working estate.

The proposals here have already made the journey your own will make. Each one was uploaded, read, benchmarked by a human analyst, and delivered back as a report. Open any of them. That is the first habit to build in a sample workspace: click the thing you would hesitate to click in production. Nothing here is real, so nothing can be damaged, and every screen has something to show you.

Take the walk slowly. Notice what a contract record carries: the vendor, the paper itself, the status on its path from uploaded to delivered. This is exactly what your own estate will look like in a month, so treat the wander as a preview, not a museum. When something raises a question, ask it now, on data where a wrong turn costs nothing.

Next stop, the renewals. The sample estate keeps them on a calendar, each with its notice window already on the clock.

A renewal here is not a date, it is an argument. Each record carries the case for the meeting: what you pay, what the paper allows, and what to ask for before the window closes.

Contoso Analytics is the one to study. Open it and read the record the way you will read your own: the term, the money, the dates that matter. A sample renewal like this one is where you practice the moves from later courses, staging the ask, briefing the team, all without a vendor on the other end.

Let the record scroll past and resist the urge to memorize it. The skill this course builds is comfort, knowing that every screen in the platform has a worked example waiting, so when a later course says try it, you have somewhere consequence free to try. Sample data is a classroom, and the classroom is always open.

The last stop on the wander is a delivered report, the work product this platform exists to produce. Read one end to end. Notice how it answers the three questions in order: the discount you are being offered, what comparable buyers land for the same deal, and where the deal ranks. When your first real report arrives, you will already know how to read it.

Lesson three. Everything here is Northwind Trading, seeded sample data. Before real contracts land, remove the sample portfolio from the dashboard. Two questions. How do you tell sample from real? And when does it come out?

Now you. Ten minutes, click anything, nothing breaks. Next is Course seventeen, Benchmarking fundamentals. Owners, Levels two and three follow.