A 3-minute exercise for finance leaders who don't fully trust the numbers landing on their desk.
Sound familiar?
You're the CFO — or the person everyone expects to have the answers. But every month, the same thing happens:
- Someone emails you a spreadsheet of production output. You're not sure who updated it last, or whether it includes yesterday's figures.
- Stock numbers come from a CSV export that someone ran manually — but it never quite matches what's in the accounts.
- Revenue figures get pulled from one system, costs from another, and by the time they land in your board pack, you've lost track of what was manual and what was automatic.
You don't distrust your team. You distrust the process — because there isn't really one. Data moves from place to place through a patchwork of exports, copy-pastes, and "Dave knows how to do that" knowledge.
The result? You spend more time checking numbers than using them.
A simple exercise you can do today
You don't need software for this. You need a blank sheet of paper and 20 minutes.
Pick one report you rely on — your monthly management accounts, a production summary, or your stock valuation — and trace it backwards:
- Start with the final output. Write it in the middle of the page. Where does it live? Excel? Email attachment? A shared drive?
- Ask: where did each number come from? Draw a line back to the source. Was it typed in manually? Exported from a system? Copied from another spreadsheet?
- Mark the handoff points. Every time data moves from one person, system, or file to another — circle it. These are your risk points. That's where numbers get stale, duplicated, or wrong.
- Note who owns each step. If only one person knows how a particular export works, write their name next to it. That's a single point of failure.
When you're done, you'll have a rough map that might look something like this:
ERP (sales orders)
↓ manual CSV export (Monday AM — Sarah)
Sales spreadsheet
↓ copy-paste totals
Management accounts (Excel) ← Stock sheet (Dave's export from warehouse system)
↓ email to FD
Board pack
It won't be pretty. That's the point. You're making the invisible visible.
What to look for
Once you've drawn it out, ask yourself:
- How many manual steps are there? Each one is a place where errors creep in.
- How many people could be off sick and break the chain? If Dave's on holiday, does the stock figure just not happen?
- Where does the same data get re-entered or re-typed? That's duplication — and duplication means drift.
- Is anything time-sensitive that relies on someone remembering to do it? Monday morning exports that slip to Tuesday. Month-end tasks that get missed.
You've probably known about some of these risks for a while. Seeing them on paper makes them harder to ignore.
What happens next?
This bit of paper is genuinely useful. It gives you clarity on where your data is fragile — and it's often the starting point for real operational improvement.
But turning that sketch into actual change — simplifying the chain, removing manual steps, connecting systems properly — takes more than a diagram. It takes someone who understands both the data and the business context to help you prioritise what to fix first and how.
That's what we do at Straxa Advisory.
For a structured approach to fixing fragmented customer and operational data, see building a single source of truth and master data management for small businesses.
We help SME finance and operations leaders turn messy, manual data flows into something they can actually trust — without needing a massive IT project or enterprise software. Bring your bit of paper — we'll walk through it together and identify the two or three changes that would make the biggest difference.