Independent board members review milestone ledgers on paper, often on flights. Legibility rules differ from what looks fine on a monitor.
Dates in ISO with spoken aliases
We print dates as 2025-03-14 with a parenthetical "14 Mar 2025" for the first occurrence in each section. Chairs told us they prefer scanning ISO columns for sorting but reading prose dates in narrative paragraphs.
Variance in days, not percentages
"Milestone slipped 12 days" communicates faster than "4.2% behind schedule" when the baseline was a single planned date, not a duration estimate.
Color is secondary to pattern
Oxidized green for on-time, tobacco brown hatch for delayed, charcoal outline for not-yet-applicable. We never rely on color alone—each cell carries a single-letter code (O/D/N) for black-and-white printing.
Keep safety counts in a separate insert
Mixing enrollment milestones with SAE counts in one table invites misreading. The ledger references the safety insert by tab number; the insert repeats the cutoff datetime in its header.