Tagged reconciliation
3 pieces
- · 10 min read
Restaurant AI Fails on Three Numbers
Sales, labour and cost of goods each mean something specific in food and beverage, and a generalist gets all three wrong in directions that look plausible. Sales taken gross rather than net of comps, voids and discounts. Labour taken as wages rather than burdened with taxes and benefits. Cost of goods recognised from a stock count rather than from consumption, so product sitting in the walk-in is treated as sold. If the figures do not tie back to the source systems, no insight should be produced.
- · 9 min read
A Queue That Fails Safe
When software controls a physical queue of people, a failure has consequences that are not data consequences. Offline-first operation at the counter, where each terminal keeps issuing from a local ledger and reconciles when connectivity returns, matters more than any feature of the central system. The dangerous failure is the recovery surge, when everything queued during an outage releases at once.
- · 11 min read
Withhold the Insight When It Does Not Reconcile
An operator reading a figure cannot tell a reconciled number from an unreconciled one, so a plausible narrative over numbers that do not tie back is indistinguishable from a correct one. Silence is the correct output. Reconciliation therefore has to be a gate in the pipeline rather than a report consulted afterwards, which means designing what the product shows when it shows nothing.