“Our reports don't reconcile across the firm”

The report is a symptom; the data layer is the cause

When numbers don't tie out, the instinct is to audit the report. But reconciliation failures almost never originate in the report — they originate underneath it, in the fact that each team is pulling from a different source of truth. Finance pulls from the accounting system, operations from a spreadsheet, the LP deck from a third export, and each defines "revenue" or "customer" or "margin" slightly differently. Every report is internally consistent and collectively contradictory.

Patching it at the report layer — reconciling by hand, adding footnotes, maintaining a master spreadsheet — treats the symptom and guarantees the problem returns next period. The error compounds silently, and the first time a board report turns out to be wrong, the team loses trust in the data entirely and retreats to manual spreadsheets, which is a step backward that's hard to reverse.

One reconciled source of truth, built once

The durable fix is a single, reconciled data layer that every downstream report reads from: a warehouse that ingests each source system, maps conflicting definitions to one shared schema, and validates that the numbers tie back to source. Once the data underneath agrees, the reports agree automatically — and you can prove where every number came from.