Your margin moved in July. Your September Financials will tell you.

Your July margin has already moved. The number shows up in September.

S&P Global's flash manufacturing PMI came in at 53.8 last month. Production growth is slowing, input cost inflation at a 14-month high, selling prices near a 4-year peak, and supplier delays are getting worse for reasons that have nothing to do with demand.

Costs are climbing faster than output, and mid-market operations feel that first.

So the question isn't whether it's happening to you. It's how long it takes you to see it.

Most operations close a month in three or four weeks. That is usually fine when input costs move a point a year. At a 14-month high it isn't, because by the time your financials surface it, you don't have any mitigation steps you can take.

Is that a finance problem? Nope.

The delay lives upstream, in the operation. Receipts are sitting uncounted on the dock. Work orders still open on jobs that shipped in June. A vendor increase that came in on an email and never made it into the item cost. Finance closes as fast as the operation feeds it, and every one of those gaps gives you a final number that everyone doubts.

Solid business process is what makes data clean. You can't report your way out of an operation that reports late.

I'd rather use the best number available than wait for a perfect one. But when costs move this fast, the timing matters more than the decimal. A rough margin read in week one beats an exact one in week six.

Pick the two or three inputs that actually drive your cost picture and shorten the distance between the work happening and the number showing up. Not a new report. A faster process than the one you already run.

Reply and tell me which number you'd want faster. I read every one.

Thanks for reading,
Sarah

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