Measure the order book from the reporting month, not from today

The board pack for August is produced in September. That one fact is enough to break an order book that looks perfectly sensible on paper.

The order book is meant to be simple: invoices already scheduled for future months. The mistake hides in the word "future". Future compared with what?

The problem: measuring from today

Suppose the order book is defined as every invoice dated after today. Run the August pack on 10 September and look at what happens to an invoice dated 5 September. It is not August's billing, because it is dated in September. It is not in the order book either, because by the time you run the pack it is no longer in the future. It falls through the gap.

Run the same pack on the 30th and the gap is a month wide. A closed month's order book shrinks every time somebody looks at it, and the totals still look plausible, because nothing is obviously missing. Each figure is believable on its own. Only the comparison between two runs gives it away.

The fix: measure from the reporting month

Pick the reporting month and hold it fixed. For August:

• Billing is everything dated in August.
• The order book is everything dated on or after 1 September.

Nothing in that definition mentions today's date, so re-running the pack in October gives the same answer as running it in September. A closed month stays closed. And the two buckets split the invoices exactly: every invoice lands in one bucket, and none lands in both.

The mirror-image mistake

The opposite error is just as easy to make. Leave the reporting month inside the order book as well, and the month's own invoicing is counted twice: once as billing and once as backlog. This one is also plausible, and also wrong. The two figures are normally added together in a pack, so a double count flows straight through to the total.

Both mistakes produce a tidy number. Neither announces itself.

The check

The split is also the test. It takes a few minutes and needs no new software:

1. Billing plus order book should equal every invoice on the system dated from the start of the reporting month onwards. If it is short, you have a gap. If it is over, you have an overlap.
2. The order book should match your CRM's own export of invoices dated after the reporting month, invoice for invoice, not just in total. A total can tie while two invoices are wrong in opposite directions.
3. Re-run a month that has already closed. The order book should not move.

If your pack fails the third check, measuring from today is the usual cause.

What to do on Monday

Pull the order book for the last closed month, then pull it again today. If the two differ and nothing was posted back-dated, find the line in the report that refers to the current date. It is usually one filter, and it is worth fixing before the next board meeting rather than after.

If you would like help getting from reports that move to a pack that stays put, we would be glad to talk it through. You can book a 30-minute discovery call, or start with our free Business Insight Assessment to see how well your business can see itself today.