Some questions are not about a single figure but about the shape of one — and the analyst answers those too, from the same governed figures:
- Shares and concentration. "What percentage of revenue comes from our top 10 customers?", "Are we too dependent on one supplier?", "What share of spend goes to each supplier?" The analyst composes the share from one calculation — the parts and the total come from the same figures, so a share can never mix two different totals — and it tells you what the whole is ("…of all net revenue in the period"). It also gives a concentration index: the higher the number (out of 10,000), the more your revenue or spend rests on a few names.
- "Why did it move?" "Why did our margin fall this month?", "What drove the revenue change?", "Why is inventory value rising?" The analyst breaks the movement into its drivers — for margin and revenue, a price effect, a volume effect and a cost effect, worked out product by product, plus the customers or suppliers who moved most — and shows its working. If the drivers it can govern do not fully account for the movement, it says so and shows the unexplained remainder as its own line. It never quietly folds a gap into one of the drivers to make the sums look tidy.
- Behaviour and positions. "Which customers have gone quiet?", "Which customers pay late?", "Who is near their credit limit?", "What is our customer retention rate?", "How variable are supplier lead times?", "What is our FX exposure by currency?" Each answer states the reading it used — for example, a "quiet" customer is one who was invoiced in the previous twelve months but not in the last 90 days, and "near the limit" means at or over 80% of the credit limit recorded on the customer. Where a figure cannot be composed honestly — a customer with no credit limit recorded, say — the analyst says that instead of inventing one.
- Sector readings. The same treatment reaches the specialist figures: unbilled WIP ageing and the effective rate per hour for services work; WIP ageing for manufacturing; the take rate and active-seller count for a marketplace; donor retention and new donors for a charity; and for fish farming, the feed conversion ratio and cost per kilo — calculated per batch, over harvested batches only, since a batch still growing has produced nothing to divide by yet.
- One honest limit, stated plainly. Ask can tell you how many orders have been received but not yet invoiced (the GRNI position, by count and quantity) — but it will not quote a GRNI value, because the value of goods received is not yet a figure the system carries in a form it can stand behind. Where the honest answer is a refusal, the refusal names what is missing.