20 years of data, zero questions answered.
Most businesses have more history than they can use. Not for lack of tools. For lack of reconciliation.
April 2026
We recently finished consolidating 20 years of data across 30 offices for a national operator. The most striking thing was not the technical work. It was that leadership had never been able to answer basic questions about their own business.
Every office invents its own conventions
Give 30 offices a shared goal, no shared schema, and 20 years. You get 30 different naming systems, 30 different file conventions, and 30 different internal definitions of what counts as a successful engagement. Each one is internally consistent. None of them are compatible.
This is not a tools problem
The first instinct is usually to buy more software. A new CRM. A new dashboard tool. A new reporting layer on top of the existing mess. None of that fixes the underlying incompatibility. It just visualises it more cleanly.
Consolidation before visualisation
Before a dashboard can help, the data underneath has to be reconciled into one schema. That means mapping every office's conventions into a common vocabulary. Deduping records. Aligning units, currencies, and date formats. Filling gaps where the data allows and flagging where it cannot be filled honestly.
This work is usually invisible
The dashboards look shiny. The reconciliation work does not. It is unglamorous, it takes longer than people expect, and nobody posts screenshots of an ETL audit on LinkedIn. But it is the only layer that lets a single group-level number mean the same thing in every office.
If leadership cannot answer basic questions about their own business, the answer is almost never a new tool. It is the reconciliation layer nobody wants to pay for. Build that first, and the dashboards build themselves.