When an operator has four delivery marketplaces, three POS exports and a spreadsheet that nobody trusts, the problem is rarely the data — it’s the absence of a model that the data can agree on.
Cateniq treats every order as a node in a canonical graph: provider payload first, normalisation second, status timelines kept distinct from internal state. The benefits compound:
- Reconciliation becomes a query, not a project. Late events are stored, not discarded.
- Refund evidence is a chain. A signed QR token links the receipt to the canonical order to the raw payload — even after a refund.
- Reports stop lying. Channel mix is computed once, not stitched from four exports.
This is not a novel idea — it’s a discipline. The hard part is keeping the canonical model honest as adapters change underneath it. We do that with raw-first persistence, capability-declared adapters and publish-blocking validation. The reward is a back office that can answer questions instead of asking them.