One number, one owner

Ask three people for last month’s revenue and you will often get three answers. Each of them is right, by the definition its owner had in mind. One includes tax. One is as of the fifth working day. One came from a spreadsheet saved before the last adjustment.

Nobody made a mistake, and the room still lost twenty minutes working out which number to believe.

The fix is not a better dashboard. It is a decision: for each figure leadership reads, name one place it comes from and one person who answers for it. Everything else either agrees with that source or explains, line by line, why it does not.

Three things follow once that decision is made.

Definitions get written down

“Revenue” stops being a word and becomes a sentence: which accounts, which date, net of what. The sentence sits next to the number.

Copies lose their authority

A figure pasted into a deck is a quotation. When it disagrees with the source, the source wins and the deck is corrected, without a meeting.

Questions find the right desk

When a number looks wrong, everyone knows whom to ask. That alone removes most of the heat from a review.

It is a small rule. Agreeing to it is the hard part, because it means some well-loved spreadsheets stop being the truth.