What to do with the number
The output is an estimate and its value isn't precision. Its value is that it's yours, built out of processes your colleagues recognize, which means it survives the only question that ever really gets asked: where did that come from?
That's also why it beats the benchmark. Every vendor deck quotes some version of "bad data costs companies 15–25% of revenue". A CFO discounts that in one sentence, and is right to, because it describes an average of organizations that are nothing like yours. A modest number built from your own reconciliation hours doesn't have that weakness. I would take €400,000 that somebody can trace over €12 million that nobody can, every time.
Three habits make it land:
Present it as a range, not a point. Give the low end and the high end, and name the assumption that moves it. Nobody trusts a data quality cost quoted to the nearest euro, and offering the range yourself takes the objection off the table before anyone raises it.
Attach it to a specific fix. The figure on its own invites an argument about method. The figure sitting next to "and here's the one control that removes most of it, and it costs this much" invites a decision. Governance gets funded as the cheaper of two numbers. It never gets funded as a good idea.
Recalculate after the fix. The second most persuasive thing you can produce is the same calculation six months later with a smaller answer. That's what turns a one-off business case into a standing line in the budget — and it's the step almost everybody skips.
What it deliberately leaves out
There's no attempt here to price reputational damage, opportunity cost, or the decisions your organization quietly didn't make because nobody trusted the report. Those are real, and they're often bigger than the operational cost. They also can't be estimated defensibly, and putting a soft number next to a hard one contaminates both — the meeting stops being about the hard one within about a minute.
This also measures the cost of the current state, not the return on a governance program. Those are different claims, and conflating them is the most common way a business case falls apart under a second look. Cost of the problem: this calculator. Cost of the fix: a scope and a quote.
Where to go next
If the number is big enough to act on, the maturity assessment tells you which capability gap is producing it, and the template library has the pain-point worksheet I use to trace a cost back to the process that creates it.
And if you want help turning this into something with a budget attached, the advice and support page describes the diagnostic that usually comes next — or, if you'd rather just get a second opinion on the number before you present it, that's exactly the kind of thing a thirty-minute session is for.
