The management accounts land on the 21st. The decisions were made on the 3rd.

A number that is exact but late has already lost the argument to a number that was roughly right when it mattered.

By Steve 5 min read
Abstract bridge artwork for The management accounts land on the 21st. The decisions were made on the 3rd.

In a great many businesses the monthly pack is a genuinely careful piece of work. Accruals are right, stock is reconciled, the intercompany balances agree, and the gross margin figure would survive a challenge. It arrives on the twenty-first. By then the month it describes is three weeks gone, and the decisions it might have informed were taken on the third, from memory, by people who had a feeling about how the last month went. The problem is rarely that the finance function is slow. It is that the reporting…

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