Notes on trustworthy data

A consultant built a tool his clients loved in demos and refused to actually use. It points to something to weigh before hiring one: you rarely need to hand your data to an outside tool. The durable work gets built inside the systems you already own.

Your reporting is a mess and someone suggested hiring a data analyst. For most small and mid-sized companies, that's the wrong first move. Here's how to tell what you actually need, and the cheaper fix that usually comes first.

Your CRM says you closed $180K; QuickBooks says $150K, same month. Here's why sales and accounting systems never quite agree, and how to make them reconcile without buying new software.

Manual, spreadsheet-driven reporting has a real price, in hours and dollars, but it never shows up as a line item. A 30-second calculator to make yours visible, and decide whether it's worth fixing.

You bought the dashboard everyone said you needed, and the Monday meeting is exactly as confusing as before. The dashboard was never the problem. Here's what sits underneath it, and what actually fixes reporting for good.

When finance and operations disagree on the same figure, the problem usually isn't a broken formula: it's an undefined one. Here's what's actually going on, and how to fix it for good.