Reconciliation Debt

Reconciliation debt is the accumulated gap between what a dashboard shows and what actually happened, and it accrues interest every reporting cycle. Every source an agency bolts into a client dashboard (ad platforms, GA4, CRM, billing) carries its own attribution logic, consent loss, and refresh lag, so each added integration widens the surface where two numbers can disagree in front of a client. The framework asks agencies to price that gap before scaling source coverage: a 20-source stack with three known discrepancies is more expensive than a 12-source stack with one documented caveat. Dana DiTomaso's argument that Universal Analytics masked attribution's structural limits while GA4 exposed them is the clearest recent illustration, because clients trained on the old numbers now read consent-driven underreporting as agency failure. Treat reconciliation as a line item in the retainer, not a cleanup task after the quarterly review goes sideways.