With the wide set of modern analytics tools available today, it’s tempting to assume that building a company Single Source of Truth (SSOT) – a centralized database – should be straightforward.

Cloud databases, BI platforms, documentation platforms, and data flow frameworks are more powerful than ever. With a sufficiently large budget, almost any technical capability can be developed. Yet in practice, SSOT remains elusive for many FP&A and data teams.

The reason remains in two recurring pain points: compliance / data governance constraints, and high technical barriers of access.

Compliance and Data Governance as Constraint

One of the least discussed blockers to SSOT is compliance.

Even when data is produced internally, authorizing external/cloud based storage is often difficult. For example, security reviews and internal policies introduce long approval cycles and rigid constraints. Sometimes, these controls significantly slow down the ability to centralize data in a way that supports analytics and automation.

As a result, teams default to local storage: spreadsheets, isolated BI models, or my favorite: local MS Access databases. These don’t require approvals, are easier to control, and faster to deploy. Unfortunately, they fragment the truth by design and therefore don’t allow organizations to scale their analytics capabilities.

Limited Access to External Databases

Cost is another underestimated friction point. External databases often come with pricing models that scale faster than their return value.

In particular, small organization with limited team expertise, find themselves short on budget and capabilities. Often required to invest heavily in consulting services and having difficulty maintaining the solutions with internal resources, resulting in lower return on investment (ROI).

Over time, the path to scalable analytics capability becomes a permanent dependency to external consulting.

Knowledge Barriers and the Human Cost of Centralization

Even when compliance is cleared and budgets are approved, knowledge barriers remain.

Centralized data platforms require specialized skills, for example, database design, access management, performance optimization, and data modeling. These skills are not evenly distributed across FP&A or business teams. As a result, SSOT initiatives often depend on a small number of technical experts.

This creates fragility. When access to the source requires mediation, teams revert to what they can control, which is usually Excel files and local models. The more centralized the system, the higher the perceived barrier to entry, even if the data itself is meant to be shared.

Why Centralized Storage Still Matters

Despite these challenges, centralized storage remains critical for scalability.

When data lives in a single trustworthy location, automation becomes feasible. Just to name a few benefits:

• Reports can be refreshed without manual intervention, decreasing the amount of FTE required for data analytics.
• Forecast models can pull from consistent inputs, reducing errors and improving forecast accuracy.
• Ad-hoc analysis no longer requires reconciling multiple sources before answering a question, improving speed and reliance.

From a tooling perspective, the benefit is compounding. Connecting Power Query, BI tools, or scripts to one stable source is fundamentally simpler than managing a web of individual files and point-to-point connections.

Multi-User Environments Change the Equation

The value of centralized storage increases exponentially when multiple people interact with the same data.

Users can connect directly to the database and trust that the data is accurate, current, and consistent. The focus shifts from manual checks to business analysis and strategic advising.

This is where SSOT moves from being a data ideal to an startegic necessity. In collaborative environments, fragmented storage is not just inefficient—it actively prevents scale.

Summary

The difficulty of building SSOT is due to data governance constraints, and high technical barriers of access.

Until organizations explicitly address this tension, SSOT will continue to be discussed more often than it is achieved.