The source line that survives a pointed finger
3 June 2026 · Tamar Gelashvili
A director will eventually point at a bar. If the footnote cannot name the tab, the sitting pauses for the wrong reason.
Board-morning support exists because of this moment: a new director points at a headcount bar and asks whether contractors are in. If the answer is in someone’s head, the sitting waits. If the answer is at the foot of the page — file, tab, line, date of close — the sitting continues.
We write source lines in a dull way on purpose. They are not prose. They look like: “Headcount, Group HR workbook, tab ‘April close’, row 14, contractors excluded, close 8 May.” Dull is the point.
What we will not put in a source line: “management accounts” with no tab; “unaudited” as a mood rather than a status; a link to a folder nobody in the room can open while the projector is on.
Finance leads sometimes ask us to hide the source line because it looks untidy. We keep it. The tidy version is the one that fails when the chair’s cousin joins for a quarter.
If you send us files for a monthly refresh, send them in the same shape as last month. A renamed tab breaks the line. We will not guess. We will leave last month’s figure and say so in the covering note. That has annoyed people. It has also prevented a bar that was last March’s volume sitting under an April title.