Property Data Type

A property data type says what kind of value a property holds — string, number, boolean, date or list — and that type decides what analysis is possible on it.

A property data type quietly decides what question you can ask: on a number you can sum and average, on a string you can only group and count, on a date you can compute ranges and gaps, and a boolean has just two states. A common error is sending a number as a string; a price of '15000' as a string can no longer be summed and the revenue report breaks, even though it looks right at a glance. The second trap is type inconsistency over time: if a property arrives as a number one day and a string another, the tool either rejects it or splits it into two columns and the trend breaks. So each property's type should be fixed from day one and defined in the tracking plan, because changing a type on accumulated data is costly and sometimes impossible.