Why historical clarity matters more than raw numbers
When I was responsible for preparing annual FDD updates for a multi-unit organization, I assumed the difficult part would be reviewing the numbers.
It wasn’t.
The most challenging part was reconstructing historical transfers — exactly when locations changed hands, and from who to who.
Because I knew how heavy the lift would be, I often started weeks or even months in advance.
The information I needed was not in one place. Some of it was in spreadsheets, some in old reports, some in email chains, and some in different departmental files. Real estate had one version, operations had another, and historical context often lived in institutional memory.
Yet the final reporting required precise historical accuracy across multiple years, including openings, closures, and transfers, often organized by state.
We had data; what we didn’t always have was a preserved historical record that could be trusted without manual reconstruction.
Over time, it became clear that this wasn’t just a reporting inconvenience.
It was an operational history problem.
If historical changes aren’t captured in a structured system as they happen, they eventually have to be reconstructed manually — under pressure, and with higher risk of error.