Same business. Same month. Two answers.
The finance pack says revenue was £1.24m. The operations dashboard says £1.31m. Both were built by capable people from the same systems. So which is right?
Usually, both are, by their own rules. And that's the problem.
Why two reports disagree
When every report is built straight from raw exports, every report has to make its own decisions about the data. Small differences creep in:
- Cancelled and credited work. One report nets off credit notes; the other doesn't.
- Duplicates. The same customer appears twice in the CRM and once in the accounts, so a total is counted twice in one place and once in another.
- Timing. One report uses the invoice date, the other the job completion date.
- Definitions. "Revenue" means invoiced in one place and earned in another.
None of those is a mistake on its own. Together, they mean the same question gets a slightly different answer depending on who built the report and when. Over time, people stop trusting any of them.
The fix: decide once, in layers
Large enterprises solved this a long time ago with an approach called the Medallion architecture. Rather than every report making its own decisions, the data passes through three layers, and each decision is made once.
| Layer | What it holds | What happens there |
|---|---|---|
| 01 Bronze | Raw, as it landed | Every field exactly as the source system gave it. Nothing thrown away. |
| 02 Silver | Cleansed and conformed | Duplicates removed, types fixed, and the same customer matched across every system. |
| 03 Gold | Certified for reporting | Your business logic applied and signed off. |
Bronze: raw, as it landed
Bronze keeps a faithful copy of what each system sent. Nothing is cleaned or discarded yet. That matters because it means we can always show our working: any figure further up can be traced back to exactly what arrived.
Silver: cleansed and conformed
Silver is where the data is tidied. Duplicates are removed, dates and amounts are given consistent types, and records are matched across systems, so the customer in your accounts system and the customer in your CRM become one customer.
Gold: certified for reporting
Gold is where your rules live. What counts as revenue, how margin is calculated, when a job is complete: these are agreed with you, applied once and signed off. Gold is the only layer that reports and the AI Assistant are allowed to read.
What that means day to day
Because every report, every question to the assistant and every alert reads from the same gold tables, they can't drift apart. If the definition of margin changes, it changes once, in gold, and everything that uses it follows.
It also means arguments about the numbers become arguments about the rules, which is a much better conversation to have. Instead of "whose spreadsheet is right?", it's "should credit notes count against the month they were raised, or the month of the original invoice?" Decide it once, and it stays decided.
How Vizora does it
Vizora Data Forge runs this bronze, silver and gold approach for you, on your own data, in your own private database on Microsoft Azure in the UK. Vizora runs the data layer, so there's nothing for your team to build or maintain, and nothing in your source systems is replaced or changed.
If your finance pack and your operations dashboard don't agree, our free reporting health check is a good place to start. In 30 minutes we'll look at where the numbers come from and where they part company, then send you a one-page summary within a day. Book your health check.