# Data manifest

URL: https://sellmydatatoai.net/glossary/data-manifest

A data manifest is a structured inventory of a dataset that lists its sources, record counts, date ranges, formats and known exclusions.

A data manifest is a structured inventory of everything in a dataset: the systems it came from, record counts, date ranges, languages, file formats, sizes and what was removed. Buyers use it to price the data before they see a sample and to check the delivery against it afterward.

## What goes in a data manifest?

| Field | What it records |
| --- | --- |
| Source system | The tool each record came from, such as Zendesk, Jira or Slack |
| Record count | Tickets, messages or files by type |
| Date range | First and last record dates |
| Languages | Each language and its share of records |
| Formats | JSON, CSV, Parquet or original files |
| Exclusions | What was removed, such as HR records or payment data |
| File hashes | A checksum per file for the delivered version |

## Why do buyers trust a data manifest?

Buyers trust a data manifest when it is tied to a version and can be checked. Contributors to a 2026 Hugging Face forum thread on selling datasets suggested evidence packs bound to file hashes, so a buyer can confirm the delivered files match what was sampled.

Manifest accuracy is one of the eight points in our [seller vetting](https://sellmydatatoai.net/how-we-vet). See [how to build a data manifest](https://sellmydatatoai.net/guides/how-to-build-a-data-manifest) and [dataset card](https://sellmydatatoai.net/glossary/dataset-card).