Two sets of books

Finance has been keeping a different year from marketing, and this is the week the two years meet.

All year marketing reported a revenue figure. It came off the platforms, and it added up to something that looked like a good year. Finance booked a smaller one. Net of the returns that came back three weeks after every peak, net of the refunds, net of the discount marketing called free because it never appeared on a media invoice.

Two honest people, two ledgers, one business. Neither number is wrong. They answer different questions, and nobody wrote down which question the company was asking.

I first met the gap on an FMCG ledger, when I managed brands in Egypt. The sales team celebrated a gross figure. The P&L received what was left after the trade spend, the listing fees and whatever came back from the shelf, and the same month could be a good one in the sales meeting and a poor one in the finance review. I met it again years later as platform revenue against the bank statement. Same gap, different clothes.

Every December a room is convened to close it, and every December the conversation turns into attribution. Which platform claimed what, and over which window, and whether the model over-counts. It is a comfortable argument, because everyone in it can be right.

Attribution is the wrong word for it. The word is definition. Gross or net. Before the returns come back or after. Whether the number that goes upstairs is the platform's or the bank's. Three sentences, and they could have been agreed in January, when the year was empty and nobody had anything to defend.

They were not, because in January nobody wants to argue about a number that does not exist yet. So the definition gets settled in December, by whoever holds the ledger the chief executive believes, and marketing discovers it spent a year reporting in a currency finance never accepted.

Whoever settles the definition in January owns December.