The meeting where nobody agrees on the number
There is a meeting that happens in almost every growing company. Leadership presents the month's results. Someone from sales says revenue is up 12%. Someone from finance says that, according to their data, it was 9%. Someone from operations has a third number. The next half hour goes to figuring out who is right, not to deciding what to do with the results.
That meeting is not a communication problem. It is a data problem. And it has a concrete technical cause that can be solved.
Why it happens: data silos and inconsistent definitions
When each department in a company works with its own systems and its own data exports, it is inevitable that the numbers diverge. Not because anyone is wrong, but because they are measuring different things with the same name.
Does revenue include returns or not? Does the order count when it is placed, when it is confirmed, or when it is paid? Is sales working with CRM data while finance works with ERP data, and do the two systems record the same event at different moments? Each of those differences produces a different number, and they are all "correct" from within their own system.
The problem is not that someone is doing their job badly. The problem is that there is no single source of truth with an agreed definition of each metric.
The real cost of meetings that debate numbers instead of decisions
A leadership meeting that runs 90 minutes and spends 30 of them sorting out which of the two numbers is correct is operating at a third of its real capacity. Multiply that by how often it happens and by the hourly cost of the people in that room, and you have a concrete figure for how much the problem costs.
But the biggest cost is not in the hours. It is in the decisions made on the basis of the wrong number, or not made at all because nobody trusts the available data. A company that does not trust its own metrics runs on gut feeling, even if it has dashboards.
The goal is not to have more data. It is that everyone works with the same data and that data means the same thing to all of them.
What it means to have a single source of truth
A single source of truth does not mean that all the data lives in one system. It means that when there is a question about a specific metric, there is an official place to go for the answer, with an agreed definition of how it is calculated.
Implementing that in a company of 50 people takes three things: centralizing the relevant data in a shared system (not each department with its own spreadsheet), explicitly defining how each metric is calculated and who is responsible for its quality, and making that definition accessible to the whole team.
The third point is the one most often skipped. There is no use having a perfect definition of "confirmed sale" if only the person who built the system knows it. The definition has to be documented and accessible.
The most valuable side effect
When a company solves this problem, the most visible change is not that the numbers add up. It is that the meetings change in nature. Instead of spending time establishing what is happening, the team spends that time deciding what to do about what is happening. That is the change that has real impact on the business.
And it is also the reason why this is not a technical project. It is a business project with a technical solution.