hardScenarioCase StudyMidSeniorLead
Finance and Operations quote different figures for the same monthly number and both insist they are right. How do you settle it?
4 min readUpdated 2026-08-15
Answer
Short answer
Usually both are correct and they are answering different questions, so stop comparing totals and reconcile down to the first point of divergence. Publish a bridge that explains the gap in named components, then have one definition made authoritative with a named owner instead of declaring a winner.
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Likely follow-ups
- The gap reconciles to within 30 records and nobody can explain those. What do you do?
- How would you handle it if the two figures had already been reported externally?
- Who should own a metric definition when three departments use it differently, and what does that ownership mean in practice?
- How do you stop the same argument recurring the next time somebody builds a report?
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