What is this based on?

It is the question at the end of every review, and the honest answer has usually been an analyst's spreadsheet.

Nobody is being careless. The number was probably right. But the person who assembled it left, or the source page changed, or the working file was never version-controlled — and by the time anyone asks, reconstructing the answer takes days and sometimes does not succeed at all.

Your internal numbers were never the weak half

Accounting is audited. It is owned by a named function, defended by people who can be asked, and reconcilable to a system of record. Nobody seriously doubts it.

The external half is the unaudited side of every analysis — market structure, account hierarchy, competitor position, benchmark comparisons. It arrives from vendors, from public sources, from an analyst's research, and it arrives without its origin attached.

A conclusion inherits the weakest input it rests on. A board paper built on immaculate internal figures and one unsourced external number is an unsourced board paper.

And the old warning no longer works

Garbage in, garbage out assumed you could see the garbage. A spreadsheet with no source looked like a spreadsheet with no source, and someone asked.

What arrives now is fluent, formatted and confident, and looks exactly like the good answer. The analyst who used to catch it — who knew that field was a cost rather than a charge, and that the blank meant a non-filer rather than a zero — was the error-correction layer, and automation removes that step first.

What changes in practice

Every value we deliver carries a Sourceprint™ — the form and line it came from, the period it describes, the date we observed it, what a blank means in that field, and an explicit statement of what not to conclude from it.

The question stops being something to reconstruct days later. The answer travels with the value and exists before anyone asks for it.

Where the facts come from

Not from our analysis of the market. From what these organisations asserted to federal and state regulators themselves — cost reports, tax filings, registry certifications, securities disclosures, published pricing files. Their words, their numbers, on their own forms, under their own names.

What we add is the work of making them usable together: resolving which organisation a filing is about, at the right level of corporate structure, and holding the record as the sources overwrite it. Every link traces to a filing. Challenge a figure and you are challenging the document it came from.

What we do not claim

We publish what we could not resolve, where sources disagree, days we do not hold, and what is not observable in the public record at any price. Those are on the site, not in a footnote — because a vendor making this argument without publishing its own failure modes is making a claim it cannot sustain.