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The number you price on is worth auditing.
Most firms have reporting. Fewer have checked whether the figure they make decisions on was drawn from the right population.
A dashboard is easy. A dashboard whose numbers survive being questioned by the person they contradict is the actual job.
We build reporting the same way we build everything else: from the source records, with the definitions written down, and with the exclusions named rather than hidden inside a filter.
What that involves
- Deciding what counts, in writing, before anything is charted
- Excluding by reason, never by threshold — a rule that drops everything under a number will quietly drop real work too
- Carrying the sample size next to every figure, so a percentile drawn from eleven records cannot pass for one drawn from a thousand
- Showing what is still in progress separately from what is finished
An average taken across the wrong population is not a small error. It is a confident number pointing the wrong way.
What it looks like in practice
A firm quoting fixed fees against a blended average cost per case. Rebuilt from the underlying billing records, the average turned out to have been drawn from a population that included matters which were never representation at all — and it concealed a threefold spread between case types that were being priced identically.
The more useful finding was structural. The firm's exposure was never the price it quoted. It was the term: most cases were still billing well after the fixed period had run out. That is a different problem with a different fix, and no amount of adjusting the price would have reached it.
Want to know whether this applies to your firm?
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