Identity

A sum that must hold on every computed table, such as parts equal the whole, checked every time the table is produced.

DefinitionA sum that must hold on every computed table, such as parts equal the whole, checked every time the table is produced.

An identity is an equation that has to be true of a table if the table is right: assigned accounts equal covered plus uncovered; prior revenue plus expansion minus contraction minus churn equals current revenue from the same customers; orders equal OTIF plus late only plus short only plus both; allocated cost equals the cost pools. It is checked in code every time the table is computed, and a table whose identity fails is not shown.

It differs from a control total, which checks that an export arrived complete against a figure from the source system, and from a reconciliation, which is the work of explaining why two files disagree. The identity is the cheapest of the three and the one that catches the most: a customer counted twice, a row dropped by a join, a state left out of a rule. See identity and reconciliation.

How it is used

For each table, an equation that must be true is written down and checked in code every time the table is produced. A table whose identity fails is withheld and the failing rows are listed.

Example

Assigned accounts 400, covered 312, uncovered 85. The identity fails by three: three accounts are assigned to two reps and were counted once as covered and once as uncovered.

Where it goes wrong

Checked once when the report was built. Data changes every week and the check has to run every week.

Articles that use this term

Board and management reporting

A board narrative with a citation on every number: how to draft the commercial pack from reconciled figures

A method for writing the quarterly commercial narrative so every figure carries a citation to the calculation that produced it: the reconciled roll-up as the source, the narrative structure, the citation format that survives export, and why the model writes sentences but never numbers.

16 Sept 20263 min read AI and self-service analytics

Account health score: why a computed score beats a colour-coded one

What is wrong with the red-amber-green account health field most CRMs carry, what a computed health score is made of, five inputs from the ledger and the CRM with stated weights, how the weights are set from the company's own churn history rather than opinion, why the score is shown with its inputs and never alone, the identity that every account has one score from the same rule, and how the score is validated against what happened.

16 Sept 20263 min read Data quality and reconciliation

Account hierarchy: parents, subsidiaries and the level you actually sell to

How to build and use an account hierarchy for sales analytics: the levels that exist in most customers, group, legal entity, site, department, the one level where the buying decision is made and every measure is computed, the levels beneath kept as dimensions, the dated parent mapping that survives acquisitions, the identity that revenue sums identically at every level, and the two mistakes that produce forty customers where there is one and one where there are forty.

16 Sept 20263 min read Coverage and territory

Account penetration rate: formula, denominators and a worked example

Account penetration rate defined, accounts buying over accounts in a stated universe, the four denominators it is computed against and what each answers, the target list, the estate, the segment universe and the installed base, a worked example per rep against a target list, the roll-up, the identity to the universe file, and why a penetration rate with no stated universe is a percentage of nothing.

16 Sept 20262 min read Territory, capacity and quota planning

Activity and outcome measures: which belong in compensation, and which do not

Why paying reps on activity measures produces activity and paying them only on outcomes produces sandbagging, the three tests a measure passes before it goes into a plan, the rep controls it, it cannot be gamed by logging, and it reconciles to a ledger, which coverage and outcome measures pass, which fail, the coverage-at-cadence exception that passes all three, and the identity that every credited dollar in a plan is a ledger dollar once.

16 Sept 20263 min read Wallet share and penetration · Education

Adoption by purchase cohort: what institutions that bought three years ago hold now

How an education provider reads its base by first-purchase cohort, from the order history: the institutions that first bought in each year, how many are still customers, what programmes they hold now against what the cohort held at first purchase, the cohorts that expanded and the cohort that stalled, and why a cohort view finds the year something changed in onboarding or product that the renewal rate never explains.

16 Sept 20262 min read