Reports assembled from the record, not the night before.
When reporting is a monthly project, the numbers are stale before the meeting starts — and doubted during it. This engagement builds reporting that flows from approved operational records, so reviews are about decisions, not data gathering.
The report was due Monday. The data gathering started Sunday.
Every period-end, someone reconstructs the month from five sources, three spreadsheets and two people’s memory. The figures arrive late, disagree with each other, and trigger a second meeting about whose numbers are right.
The problem is upstream: reports can only be as trustworthy as the records they draw from. Reporting systems work starts at the record, not the dashboard.
- Reports assembled manually before every review
- Conflicting numbers from conflicting sources
- Meetings spent questioning data instead of deciding
- No single, current view of operational performance
Fix the record first. The report follows.
An engagement that works backwards from the decisions your reports must support. Deliverables are agreed with you during scoping.
Illustrative workflow-
Name the decisions
You tell us which reviews and decisions the reporting must support — board, management, funder, operational — and what “trusted” means to you.
Decision-first scope -
Trace the sources
We trace each required figure back to the record it should come from, and identify where those records are missing, late or manual.
Source map -
Agree definitions
We define each measure once — what it includes, its source, its owner — so the same word means the same number everywhere.
One definition -
Configure and validate
Reporting views are configured against the sources and validated against a period you already know the answer for.
Validation gate -
Run the first cycle
The first live reporting cycle runs with close review. Discrepancies are traced to their record, fixed at the source, and the view earns trust cycle by cycle.
Earned trust
Reporting you can defend, cycle by cycle.
Within its role
- Trace every reported figure to its source record
- Define measures once, with named owners
- Configure reporting views from approved records
- Validate against known periods before going live
Always with people
- Promise real-time accuracy from broken upstream records
- Build dashboards over data nobody owns
- Guarantee adoption of the numbers by their sceptics
- Automate judgement about what the figures mean
Bring us one reporting question.
We will look at how the work moves today, where authority should sit, and what a sensible first phase could look like.