Scattered spreadsheets are not a discipline problem. They are what happens when a company grows faster than its reporting: someone needed a number, made a file, and the file stayed. By the time there are eleven of them, every meeting opens with an argument about whose figure is right.
Start from the questions, not the files
Write down the five questions you actually ask each month. How much cash is left in twelve weeks? Which clients are late? Which service line earns its keep? The answers define the structure. Consolidating files before knowing the questions produces a tidier mess.
Pick one base and make everything else a view
One structured base holds the raw records: invoices, payments, costs, headcount. Every report reads from it and nothing is retyped. The rule is simple — if a number is entered twice, it will disagree with itself within a month.
Fix the inputs before the visuals
- One row per real event, never a row that summarises other rows.
- Dates that mean something specific: invoice date and payment date are different columns.
- Categories chosen from a fixed list, not typed by hand.
- One currency for reporting, with the original amount kept alongside.
Then, and only then, the dashboard
With clean inputs, the dashboard is the easy part — a day or two of work rather than a quarter. With messy inputs, no visualisation tool will save you; it will render the disagreement in higher resolution.
Keep it alive
A source of truth decays the moment someone starts a side file to answer a question the base cannot. When that happens, treat it as a specification: the base is missing a field. Add it, and delete the side file the same week.
This is the sequence Sumzee runs in the first 48 hours with a new client: map the questions, build the base, then build the dashboard on top of it.
