Complicated source data should not produce mysterious answers

A difficult set of records can still produce a simple-looking total. The risk is that the total no longer shows how it was reached.

IG365 treats that as a failure of the answer, not a success of the presentation. If a person cannot see where a figure came from, which checks were applied, and which items did not fit, they have been given a mystery with a number attached.

Provenance is the first defence. A value should be able to point back to the export, statement, or file it came from. Verification is the second: the value is checked against that source rather than trusted because it arrived in a familiar column. Reconciliation is the third. Where two sources describe the same activity, agreement and disagreement are both part of the result.

Exceptions belong in the answer. Payments in lieu, reversals, missing rows, duplicated exports, and records that almost match are not noise to be smoothed away. They are often the reason the question was hard.

Software is useful here when it can repeat those checks more consistently than a person reconstructing them by hand. The software does not earn trust by hiding the working. It earns trust by making the working readable.