Key results
- An A$350K difference between two sales reports traced to one likely explanation.
- A clear next step for finance, instead of a vague sense that the numbers were off.
- Sales data from the ERP, branch reports and team spreadsheets checked side by side.
A business spread across systems
The manufacturer’s sales figures lived in more than one place. The ERP held the transactions, each branch and head office reported on its own activity, and the team kept spreadsheets to pull it all together.
Each source made sense on its own. Together, they fed decisions about targets, stock and cash flow. But answering a simple question like “what did we sell this year?” meant pulling numbers from several places and hoping they lined up.
Usually they did. This time, they didn’t.
Two reports, two different answers
Two reports covering the same nine months came back with different sales totals. The gap was around A$350,000.
Neither report looked wrong on its own. Each had its own filters and its own idea of what counted as a sale. Nobody could say which one was right, or why they disagreed.
Answering that meant going back to the source: what the ERP actually held, and how each report had been built.
How Platypus connected the context
Platypus pulled the sales data straight from the ERP and broke it down by branch.
One branch stood out. Head office sales came to almost exactly the size of the gap.
That pointed to a simple explanation. One report was leaving head office out, while the other was counting it. It was the same sales, just counted two different ways.
Platypus also flagged what finance still needed to confirm: the original report settings, the spreadsheet behind the higher number, and whether both reports used the same definition of a sale.
The outcome
What started as an unexplained A$350,000 gap became a clear, checkable answer. The finance team knew where the difference came from and how to confirm it.
For the team, a confusing mismatch became something they could act on: one likely cause, the evidence behind it, and a short list of checks to settle it.