GuideMeasurement and attribution
Single source of truth
Definition
One agreed number for each thing the company steers by, and one system appointed in advance to win when two reports disagree. Everything else reconciles to it.
How you recognize it
You have one when the monthly number can be requested without specifying whose version. The number has a named owner. Its definition is written down, including the boring edges, like refunds and the date on which a deal counts. And precedence is settled in advance: when the CRM and the shop system disagree, everyone already knows which wins. For revenue the winner is finance, and every dashboard reconciles to it on a schedule, with the size of the gap recorded.
What to watch for
Watch the first minutes of your next leadership meeting. If they go to establishing which revenue figure is the real one, the meeting is paying for a missing definition every month, at the cost of the decisions it never reached. Then take the dashboard everyone quotes and ask when it was last checked against finance; treat an answer of never as the finding. In a new engagement this is where I start, because CAC and every budget decision downstream inherit whichever revenue number was chosen underneath them.
The question you ask
“When these two numbers disagree, which one wins?”