Management reporting: from the spreadsheet to a certified figure

Almost every organisation has an information layer that appears in no architecture diagram: the spreadsheets a management team uses to decide. They work, for as long as the person who maintains them is still there.

Dismantling them is not technical work. You start from the questions those files actually answer — which rarely match the official reports that already exist — and trace back to the sources and the calculation rules, usually written down nowhere but in the head of whoever built them.

The delicate part is the overlap: for a while the certified figure and the historical spreadsheet run in parallel and every difference is explained, one at a time. Almost always this surfaces legitimate adjustments nobody had written down, which then have to be brought inside the official rules.

The result is not one more dashboard. It is a number nobody argues about any more, and one that stays available when the person who produced it moves on.