The records exist. The answer does not.

This is a problem pattern, not a client story. IG365 is describing a kind of work it is interested in, not reporting an engagement.

The records are often already in the building. They sit in exports, inboxes, shared drives, broker statements, platform reports, and spreadsheets that have quietly become the system of record. Nobody is waiting for more data. They are waiting for an answer: what was received, what matches, what is missing, what needs a person to look at it.

The manual path is usually understandable and exhausting. Someone opens the files, recognises the columns they trust, copies figures across, and keeps a list of the rows that did not fit. The next month they do it again. A new file format, a reversal, or a second source makes the list longer.

The software path fails in a different way when it imports the files and presents a total that cannot be tied back to them. The person still does the old check, because the new number does not explain itself.

A useful solution starts from the answer that is missing, uses the records that already exist, and leaves the exceptions visible. It does not start from a request to redesign the source data before anyone has understood the question.