Independent data assessment
I find out whether an organization's data can prove what it actually did.
Ravikanth Andhavarapu — independent director and audit committee chair of a BSE-listed company. Fifteen years building data platforms and the teams that run them.
The problem I work on
Most organizations can produce a number. Far fewer can show where it came from. The gap between those two things stays invisible until someone asks — a funder, an auditor, a board — and then it becomes a scramble that a few people absorb quietly, every reporting cycle.
That gap is usually not a software problem. Financial data sits in one system, delivery data in another, and the join between them is nobody's job. So it gets done by hand, by someone who is good at it, and the cost never appears in a budget because it is absorbed rather than spent.
I trace numbers from where the work happens through to where it gets reported, and I write down what I find — including when I find nothing worth fixing. I sit on the side of the table that asks how you know, not the side that sells you a system.
Recent work
I read the public filings of 800 mid-sized American nonprofits to see whether their reported numbers trace back to anything.
had a major revenue line move by more than 25 percentage points in a single year while total revenue stayed flat — the same money, landing somewhere else. It is not fraud, and it is mostly not an accounting change.
How to reach me
Email me a paragraph about what you are trying to prove and to whom. I answer everything, and I will say plainly if I don't think an assessment would find anything worth the time.
More: the assessment I offer · what I have built · writing