We are regularly called in after the monthly meeting has turned into an argument about whose number is correct. Sales has a figure from their spreadsheet, accounts has a different one from their ledger, and stores has a third from their own count. Nobody is lying. Each list was accurate when it was last updated, and nobody has updated all three at the same time since.
The underlying problem is not the tools, it is that the same fact, a sale, a stock movement, a payment, is being recorded in more than one place by more than one person, from memory rather than from a shared source.
One record, several views
The fix we build is almost always the same shape: one place where a transaction is entered once, and the other departments see a view of that same record instead of keeping their own copy. It is less exciting than a new dashboard, but it is the part that actually ends the argument.
