You can't fix what you can't see. And right now, you can't really see your spend. It's scattered — across different accounts, different suppliers, and a handful of habits nobody ever wrote down.
Each piece looks fine on its own. Put together, they tell a story nobody's reading — because the signal's still scattered across a dozen different places.
The leak is sitting in your own records right now. It just isn't anywhere you'd happen to notice it.
Aggregation is where that changes. It's not glamorous — nobody gets excited about it — but it's where clarity starts.
It's the unglamorous part I start with: pulling everything into one frame. I did versions of this by hand for years in construction, long before software made it easy — adding up what a job was really costing across a stack of suppliers nobody had bothered to reconcile. The work hasn't changed. The stack just got taller.
In practice it's plain detective work. Three suppliers that turn out to be one — "Acme," "Acme Corp," and "Acme East" — folded back into a single name. The same category called three different things, finally called one. Prices from across the whole year lined up side by side, so for once you can actually compare them.
The temptation, when the records are a mess, is to call it hopeless and give up. Don't. The mess is the point. It's exactly where the money's been hiding.
Because once it's all in one frame, the patterns surface on their own. Not because the numbers changed. Because you can finally see them.
Aggregation doesn't create savings. It shows you where they already are.