Your data

Where your data lives

Most of what we build needs a copy of your data: customers, items, invoices, orders. That copy sits in one of two places, and you choose which.

The usual choice is a server in India. A server is a computer rented by the month in a data centre. Customer names, phone numbers and invoices stay inside the country, which matters for India's data protection law and for your own peace of mind. The server is rented in your name where possible, so the bill and the login are yours. If you would rather keep everything in the building, we can set it up on a machine in your office instead. It is a little more work to look after, and we will tell you honestly whether it suits you.

How it is cleaned

Data from a running business is never tidy. The same customer is saved three ways. An item is spelt differently on the purchase side and the sales side. Codes changed two years ago and half the sheets still use the old ones. None of this is anyone's fault. It is what happens when five people type into four systems for ten years.

We clean it once, properly, before anything else is built. That means:

• Duplicate customers and suppliers merged into one record each, with the old names kept as alternative spellings so nothing breaks.
• Item names and units made consistent, so that "2 inch PVC pipe" and "PVC PIPE 2IN" become one item.
• Codes matched across systems: Tally ledger names to the billing software, HSN codes to items, branch names to the ones on the GST portal.
• Dates, amounts and phone numbers put in one format.

Then we keep it clean. The system checks new entries as they arrive. Anything that looks like a duplicate or an odd spelling goes on a short list for someone on your team to confirm each week. Five minutes on a Friday keeps the data usable for years. This is the first piece of Make your numbers work.

How reports are generated

Every report we build reads from the same cleaned data, and it is rebuilt every night. That one rule removes the most common argument in any office: the sales report says one number, the accounts report says another, and someone spends an afternoon finding out why.

On the first morning of the month, the monthly report is already there. Daily reports arrive on WhatsApp or email before the shop opens. Nobody exports, pastes or formats anything. If a figure looks wrong, the fix is made once, in the data, and every report agrees the next morning. What the reports can tell you is covered under Forecasts and analysis you can act on.

What we can read

Most of the data we need already exists. It is just sitting in the wrong shape. An export from Tally, a spreadsheet someone keeps by hand, a photo of a supplier's bill, a WhatsApp message with an order in it. Here is what we can read, where it comes from, and how well it works in practice.