Field notes on your numbers

Everybody down here has a plan for the house. Fewer have one for the business records. Here is the short list, and the one question that tells you whether you are actually covered.

Most owners know what they sold. Far fewer know which product, location, or customer actually makes money, because that number lives across systems that don't talk to each other.

A financial picture rarely arrives as a picture. It arrives as statements — several banks, hundreds of pages, no two formatted alike. What turning that into a case timeline actually looks like.

Numbers can look perfectly tidy and still be lying to you. Here are the five tells a cost analyst spots first — and what fuzzy data quietly costs your decisions.