Where your reporting data comes from

Every figure in a financial report started somewhere. Someone typed it in, a system calculated it, or a file arrived from another team. When the report is questioned, the first thing a reviewer asks is where the number came from. How quickly you can answer tells you a lot about the process behind it.

These four questions help you test that process before the next review.

1. Who enters the data?

Name the person or the system that creates each kind of record. When several people enter the same kind of figure in their own way, the same item shows up in different forms in the report, and someone has to reconcile them later.

2. Where is it stored?

Find the one place that holds the record you would trust if two copies disagreed. Spreadsheets sent by email multiply quickly. Each copy gets its own edits, and nobody can say which one was used for the report.

3. Who checks it, and when?

A check only helps if it happens before the figure is used. Look for the step where someone compares an entry with its source document or with last month’s figure. If that step happens only at the end of the period, errors are found late and are harder to trace.

4. Can you trace a figure back to its source?

Pick three numbers from the latest report and follow each one back to the original entry and the document behind it. Time how long it takes. If tracing one number takes a day, a reviewer’s questions will be slow to answer as well.

What to do with the answers

Gaps in these answers show where reports are most likely to be wrong or slow to produce. Settle the entry point and the single stored record first. Checks and tracing are much easier once those two are in place.