Two reports, one number, and a $410K gap

Challenge

A distributor closed every month with two revenue numbers: one from the finance system, one from the operations dashboard the sales team actually looked at. The gap ran between two and four hundred thousand dollars and never resolved the same way twice. Both teams believed their own report, so the monthly meeting spent its first twenty minutes arguing about arithmetic rather than the business.

Nobody had ever reconciled the two end to end. The reports had been built years apart, by people who had since left, and each had accumulated its own quiet rules about credits, intercompany transfers and the day a shipment counts.

Approach

I picked one already-closed month and reconciled it line by line until every dollar of the difference had a named cause — not a category, a cause. That meant sitting with the two people who produce the reports and watching them work, because the meaningful rules were in their habits rather than in any query.

Nine differences accounted for the entire gap. Four were genuine definitional choices both sides could live with once written down. Three were bugs. Two were the same credit note counted twice in different directions.

Result

The month closes with one number and a short list of known, deliberate differences. The nine rules are documented in a page anyone can read, and a standing weekly reconciliation surfaces new breaks while they are still small enough to explain. The argument moved from whether the number is right to what the number means.