Data & Reporting
One version of the truth, fit for a board.
Reporting problems present as tooling problems and almost never are. When two reports disagree, the cause is usually that two systems define the same word differently and no one owns resolving it. Buying a dashboard on top of that produces faster disagreement.
Leadership decisions move at the speed of trustworthy numbers. When the pack takes a week to assemble and still gets debated, the company is making decisions on stale data and spending its finance team on clerical work.
What good looks like at your size
We score against this benchmark, meaning what a well-run company of 50 to 500 employees should reasonably have in place, rather than against theoretical perfection.
Every board metric has a named source and owner
For each number your leadership team relies on, someone can say which system produces it, how it is defined, and who is accountable when it looks wrong.
The pack is produced, not assembled
Monthly reporting comes out of systems in hours. Finance spends its time interpreting the numbers rather than gathering them.
Disagreements have a resolution path
When two reports conflict, there is a defined way to reconcile them and a person responsible for correcting the source, not just the slide.
History is diligence-grade
Several years of clean operational and financial history can be produced on request, because retention and definitions were decided deliberately.
Sensitive data access is scoped
Who can see customer, employee, and financial detail is deliberate, reviewed, and narrower than "everyone with a login".
What we typically find
Patterns common enough to name. None of them indicate a bad team. They are what happens when a company grows faster than the decisions that shaped its technology.
One analyst who is the reporting function
Every number routes through one person’s spreadsheets on one person’s laptop. It works until they are on holiday, and it is unrecoverable if they resign.
Two defensible versions of the same number
Revenue differs between systems because of timing or definition, both owners are correct within their own frame, and no one has authority to settle it.
An abandoned BI tool
A dashboard platform was purchased, connected to unreliable data, disbelieved, and quietly dropped. The license often survives the adoption.
Close consumed by assembly
A week of skilled finance time each month spent copying, pasting, and reconciling. Work the business is paying senior salaries to perform.
No retention strategy until it is needed
A lender or buyer asks for three years of history and the request turns into archaeology across systems that have since been replaced.
How we assess it
Where a document does not exist, that is itself a finding, and we say so plainly rather than treating the gap as an obstacle.
- Where the numbers your leadership relies on actually come from
- Manual assembly: reports built by hand from systems that don’t talk
- Data quality and ownership: who fixes it when the numbers disagree
- Reporting readiness for lenders, investors, and board meetings
- The current management reporting pack and a walkthrough of exactly how it is built
- Source systems and definitions for each key metric
- Working sessions with finance and operations on the close process and its pain points
- Any BI, warehouse, or reporting tooling in place, and its real adoption
- Past diligence, lender, or audit data requests and how they were fulfilled
Questions the readout answers
Why do two reports of the same metric disagree, and which one is right?
Could we produce diligence-grade reporting in a week if a buyer asked?
What this domain contributes to your report
- A metric lineage map: where each number originates, how it is defined, who owns it
- The manual reporting effort quantified in hours and dollars per month
- Data quality issues ranked by the decisions they distort
- A pragmatic path to reporting that is automated and trusted, sequenced by value
How this domain is scored
Every domain is scored 0–10 on the same scale, so the scorecard shows you where to look first rather than a single undifferentiated grade.
Something here can hurt the business now. These findings lead the roadmap.
Functioning, but behind where a company of your size and stage should be.
In good shape. Worth maintaining rather than investing further right now.
A genuine strength, and often something to build on elsewhere.