The meeting that becomes an argument
The sales director reports a strong month from the CRM. The finance director reports a weaker one from the accounts. Twenty minutes of the board meeting go on working out which is right, and the answer is usually some version of both, sort of.
Afterwards someone in finance spends an afternoon reconciling the two in a spreadsheet. By the next month the reconciliation is out of date and the same conversation happens again.
Both figures are honest
The difference rarely comes from a mistake. It comes from the two teams answering slightly different questions.
| Sales usually counts | Finance usually counts |
|---|---|
| Deal value when it is marked won | Revenue when it is invoiced or recognised |
| Full contract value up front | Value spread across the contract term |
| Figures including VAT sometimes | Net figures excluding VAT |
| The rep's close date | The invoice or delivery date |
| Deals that later get cancelled | Credit notes that reverse them |
Add in currency conversion done at different rates, discounts applied after the deal closed, and a few deals entered twice in the CRM, and the gap is explained. The underlying cause is that nobody wrote down what revenue means in each context, so each system encodes its own answer.
The cost of arguing about the number
Meetings get spent on the figure instead of the decision. Commission may be paid on deals that finance never sees as revenue, which creates a different kind of argument. Forecasts built from CRM data drift away from cash reality, and when the two numbers keep disagreeing, people stop trusting either and start keeping their own private spreadsheets.
That last effect is the expensive one. Once each manager has a personal version of the truth, every report becomes a negotiation.
It also shows up outside the building. A lender or investor who asks for sales figures and gets two different answers in two different documents will ask harder questions about everything else.
How we give both teams one source
- We pull the same period from the CRM and from Xero, QuickBooks or your accounts system, and match records line by line to show exactly where each difference comes from.
- We write up the categories of difference in plain language and take them to both teams. You decide the definitions, such as booked sales versus recognised revenue. We do not decide them for you.
- We build a reporting layer, usually a small database, that loads both systems daily through their APIs and applies the agreed definitions in one place.
- We add a reconciliation view that shows the bridge from booked to recognised: timing, cancellations, VAT, currency. Both numbers are shown with the reason they differ.
- We flag data problems at the source, such as a won deal with no matching invoice after a set period, to a named owner.
The point is not to make one team's number disappear. Both are useful. The point is that each has a name, a written definition and a visible link to the other.
What the monthly meeting looks like after
Each figure on the report carries its name and definition. When sales reports booked value and finance reports recognised revenue, the bridge between them is on the same page, so the conversation moves to why the gap is growing or shrinking rather than whose number is right.
Finance no longer rebuilds the reconciliation by hand. Mismatched records arrive as a short list to fix rather than a mystery to investigate.
Sales keeps its pipeline view, because a booked-deals figure is genuinely useful for planning. It just stops being mistaken for the revenue line, and the forecast can be compared against what finance later recognises, which shows how reliable the forecasting actually is.
Does this sound like your business?
- Board or management meetings open with a debate about which revenue figure is correct
- Finance keeps a reconciliation spreadsheet that is always slightly out of date
- Commission is calculated on figures finance does not recognise
- Nobody can say in one sentence what counts as a sale
- Managers keep private spreadsheets because they do not trust the official ones