Provenance

Provenance is the verifiable origin of a number: which source document it came from, which extraction produced it, and which check confirmed it.

Provenance vs. lineage

The two terms overlap and are often used interchangeably, but the emphasis differs. Lineage is the path: the chain of transformations between source and result. Provenance is the origin claim: this figure came from page four of this signed contract, read by this extraction, confirmed against the document’s own printed subtotal.

Lineage tells you how a number was built. Provenance tells you what it is evidence of. A rollup can have perfect lineage through six clean transformations and still rest on an input nobody ever tied to a document, which is why the two controls are worth keeping separate.

Where provenance decides the outcome

In audit, provenance is the difference between a supported balance and a management representation. The auditor’s request is almost always the same: show me the document. A system that stores the number but not the pointer to its source forces the finance team to go hunting through shared drives and email threads during the narrowest window of the year.

In diligence, the same pattern plays out faster and with more at stake. A buyer testing a revenue figure will pick a sample of contracts, and the speed with which each figure resolves to its contract shapes their view of the whole data room.

In board reporting, provenance is what lets a CFO answer a question in the room instead of taking it away. The figure resolves to a bank statement or an invoice on the spot.

What weak provenance looks like

Common symptoms: a number whose only support is a spreadsheet cell that references another spreadsheet; an extracted figure kept without the page it came from; a value that was corrected by hand with no record of the original or the reason; a citation that points to a document title rather than a location inside it. Each of these survives normal use and fails under scrutiny.

Rexfin’s provenance drill-down lets anyone click a figure and see the formula, the input, and the actual filed document (a contract, invoice, or bank statement) that proves it. Sources reconcile into one governed model, calculations run deterministically, and the citation stays attached to the figure rather than living in a separate document. See how it fits into the trust chain.