A number you can defend.
Group finance needs a figure that holds when the auditor asks which rate it used and when the carrier says the line is correct.
Request a pilot
The fit
- The reader
- Group CFOs, financial controllers and FP&A teams consolidating telecom spend across several legal entities.
- The question
- What does the group spend on connectivity, in one currency, and which part of it is buying delivered bandwidth?
- The constraint
- Every converted figure has to be reproducible months later, including after a rate is restated. Anything presented to a board has to hold when a carrier disagrees with it in writing.
- Where it starts
- One entity, one carrier and three invoices. That is enough to produce a figure the group can check line by line.
Outcomes
Consolidation with evidence
Spend rolls up from service to site, carrier account, entity and group. Every published figure carries the definition version it was computed under, the coverage it observed, the number of services behind it and the currency basis.
FX that holds still
Rates are append-only, so a restatement arrives as a new row. The presentation rate for a group, a month and a currency pair is resolved once and frozen onto the roll-up, so a rate corrected next week leaves a board pack already presented exactly as it was.
Allocation that conserves
Account-level and shared-backbone charges split by an explicit rule into shares summing exactly, with the remainder on the largest share. The allocation references the source charge and leaves it intact, so the original invoice remains the original invoice.
The first month
Three invoices, one entity, one figure the group can check line by line.
- The invoicesThree invoices from one operating company are parsed into lines, checked arithmetically in minor units and matched to services. Each uncertain field waits in the review queue with its source page beside it.
- The conversionsEach amount is held as billed, in the entity's functional currency and in the group's presentation currency. The rate id on every layer is visible in the row.
- The monthThe month is fixed: one cost fact per service, the presentation rate frozen onto the roll-up. The figure is published with its definition version, its coverage and its service count.
- The checkYou trace one published figure back to the invoice line it came from, through the rate it used. That trace is the pilot's deliverable.
Capabilities that serve this role
Questions from group finance
How do we reconcile this with the ledger?
Every published figure carries the number of services and the currency basis behind it, and every line keeps its billed amount beside its converted ones. Reconciliation is a comparison of totals in minor units, and a difference points at a line rather than a report.
What happens at period close?
The month is fixed with its presentation rate frozen, so a rate restated after close adds a row and leaves the closed month as presented. A correction to a line after close is a new claim, dated, with the earlier value kept beneath it.
Who signs off a converted figure?
The rate id does the signing. A converted amount names the rate row it used, the row is append-only, and the auditor can read both the rate and its source months later.
Does this replace our existing expense tool?
For a group with several legal entities and several currencies it is built to be the system of record for inventory and bills. The pilot shows whether that holds for your group before anything is replaced.
The review queue is yours
- Stance
- Some tools hide extraction uncertainty behind an internal service and show you a status. Ours is your own queue, with the source page and the exact location of each claim beside the field, per-field provenance, and a correction trail that can be reversed. Extraction carries uncertainty, and the honest response is to show you the uncertain field beside its source rather than a status.
