System of record
A system of record is the designated authoritative source for a given entity or field, the one place where, if two systems disagree, this one is right.
Designation is per-entity and per-field, not per-system. The CRM may own opportunity state while the billing platform owns invoiced amount and the product database owns usage. What matters is that each field has exactly one authority and that every other copy is explicitly derived from it.
Sync direction follows from designation. Bidirectional sync between two systems with no designated authority is not integration; it is a race condition that produces silent overwrites, and it is the root cause of a large share of "the data is wrong" escalations.
Where it breaks
Two systems bidirectionally sync the same field, and the last writer wins nondeterministically.
Related terms
- Revenue tech stack
- The revenue tech stack is the set of systems the revenue process runs on, and more importantly the integration topology connecting them.
- Single source of truth
- A source-of-truth designation names the authority for one object, field, event, artifact, role, or decision within a stated scope and effective period.
- Field governance
- Field governance is the control over what fields exist, who may write to each, whether values are constrained, and what depends on them downstream.
- Change control
- Change control is the governed process for proposing, reviewing, releasing and recording modifications to the revenue system, its fields, definitions, automations and stage criteria.
Field notes on this
- You just inherited RevOps. Start with a charter.
Being told to "own revenue operations" is not a mandate. Until authority is written down, every decision you make is reversible by whoever objects loudest.
- Why four teams report four different revenue numbers
A reconciliation problem may be definitional, technical, or both. Test the metric contract before buying another data platform.