Why your till and your online shop disagree about Tuesday

The longest meeting a small business has is the one where two screens show two numbers for the same thing. The online shop says Tuesday took £2,140. The card terminal plus the shop says £1,980. The next hour goes on working out which one is wrong.

Usually neither is. They disagree about what a day is and what counts as a sale.

Four reasons two tools disagree

• The day ends at different times. One tool closes the day at midnight UTC, the other at midnight UK time. In summer that moves an hour of evening orders into Wednesday.
• Refunds land on different days. One counts a refund on the day of the original sale, the other on the day the money went back.
• Fees come off in different places. The shop shows what the customer paid. The payment processor shows what you received.
• Tax is in or out. One figure includes VAT and one does not, and neither says so on the screen.

Every one of those is a defensible choice. That is the trouble: a metric with two defensible definitions has no definition at all.

One definition, written down

Halvard keeps each metric’s definition in one place, in plain words. Net revenue: payments captured in UK time, less refunds on the day they are issued, less processor fees, excluding VAT. Every dashboard, every alert and the Monday email read that sentence. When someone changes it, the change has a name and a date against it, and every chart moves together.

This is unglamorous and it is most of the value. A dashboard is only worth opening if the people opening it have stopped arguing about whether it is telling the truth.

What it costs you

You lose the ability to quietly pick the flattering number for a slide, which is the point. You gain a meeting that is about what to do, instead of whose export to believe.