Marketing Says It's Working. Finance Says the Bank Account Disagrees.
When the CMO's dashboard and the CFO's ledger tell two different stories about the same quarter, the problem usually isn't either team lying. It's that neither number was ever reconciled against the other.
Two teams, two systems, two numbers
Marketing's CAC and LTV figures typically come from ad-platform and analytics reporting. Finance's numbers come from the general ledger and what actually hit the bank. Nothing in most companies' stacks forces these two systems to agree, so they drift apart quietly, and the gap usually gets defended in a budget meeting instead of investigated at the source.
Switching vendors doesn't fix a record that was never reconciled
A company chasing a better number will often swap agencies or dashboards, only to find the new vendor confidently reporting a different figure, built from the same kind of unreconciled inputs as the last one. The agency or the tool usually isn't the variable that needs to change. The underlying record both sides are working from is, and no new vendor arrives with one already built.
What actually closes the gap
One reconciled, owned data record that both marketing and finance query removes the drift, because CAC and LTV get built from the same verified transactions the bank statement shows, not from two separately modeled interpretations of the same quarter. When the CFO asks where a number came from, there's one answer, not two competing ones.