It’s a familiar meeting. Sales says revenue for the quarter was one figure, finance says another, and operations has a third. Twenty minutes go on working out whose number is right, and the decision the meeting was called for gets pushed to next week.
Usually, nobody has made a mistake. Each team is answering a slightly different question with the same word.
The same word, different meanings
Take “revenue”. Sales may count an order the day it is signed. Finance counts it when it is invoiced, or when the work is delivered. Operations may count only orders that have shipped. All three are reasonable. They just aren’t the same thing, and nobody wrote down which one the business means.
The same happens with “customer” (anyone who has ever bought, or only those who bought this year?), “active user”, “margin” and almost every other number on a dashboard.
How to fix it
- Pick the ten numbers that matter most. Not every figure needs a formal definition. Start with the ones that drive decisions and appear in board packs.
- Write each definition down in one sentence. Include what is counted, what is left out, which date applies and which system the figure comes from.
- Give each number an owner. One person decides what the definition is and approves any change to it.
- Build the reports from one place. If every report draws the figure from the same data model, the numbers can’t drift apart again.
What changes
Meetings start with the number on the screen, not an argument about it. New reports are quicker to build, because the hard part, agreeing what the figures mean, is already done. And when a number moves, people trust that it moved for a real reason.
We usually run this as a focused piece of work: workshops with the people who use the numbers, a written set of definitions, and reporting rebuilt on top of them. Book a free consultation.