Lukehle Finance quorum
A review gate that asks "does this look right?" will say yes. The question is worthless because it invites confirmation.
This skill runs the opposite: independent passes each trying to break the work from a different angle, then a ruling that survives the attempts. It is the substitute for up-tiering a model on a policy-restricted seat, and it is a better control than a single capable reviewer even when up-tiering is available — because the failure modes are orthogonal, not correlated.
When to run it
| Run it | Skip it |
|---|---|
| Before a figure goes to a board, investor, lender, or auditor | Exploratory analysis nobody will rely on |
| Before staging a journal entry over materiality | Work already covered by a passing tie-out on a routine, unchanged rec |
| Before a new automation produces its first reported number | Formatting and presentation changes |
| Before changing a metric definition or a threshold | Reruns of an unchanged, previously-quorumed process |
| When a number is surprising, and when it is suspiciously unsurprising |
That last row matters. A figure that lands exactly on plan deserves the same scrutiny as one that misses — "too good" and "too clean" are both signals.
The lenses
Seat 3 to 5, chosen for the specific subject. Each gets one job and is told to find the failure, not to assess quality. Generic reviewer roles produce generic findings.
The standing four for finance work:
| Lens | Its question | Hunts for |
|---|---|---|
| Tie-out adversary | "Prove this number is wrong." | Unproven figures, thresholds set after the result, missing NOT CHECKED scope, control totals that were never independently sourced |
| Period and cutoff adversary | "Show me this is in the wrong period." | BETWEEN on timestamps, trandate vs postingperiod, timezone boundaries, open-period extracts, prior-period restatement |
| Definition adversary | "Show me this measures something other than what it claims." | Metric definition drift, moving denominators in churn, unlagged CAC, mixed sign conventions, ARR that does not reconcile to revenue |
| Downstream adversary | "Who gets hurt if this is wrong, and how late do they find out?" | Blast radius, irreversibility, whether the error is self-correcting or compounds, who has already been told |
Add subject-specific lenses as the work demands — a disclosure adversary for anything published (PII, aggregation thresholds, customer identification), a control adversary for anything an auditor will test, a stage adversary for benchmark claims (is this a mid-market benchmark applied to a seed company?).
Rule: name lenses from how this work could actually fail. "Correctness reviewer" finds nothing. "Show me this number is in the wrong period" finds the cutoff bug.
The three tiers
Use the highest tier your seat supports. The gate never gets skipped for lack of capability — it degrades.
Tier 1 — parallel subagents (full harness)
Run each lens as an independent agent that cannot see the others' findings, then a separate pass to rule on the pooled findings. Independence is the whole value: reviewers who see each other's work converge, and convergence is what you are trying to avoid.
- Reviewers: capable tier, high effort
- Each returns structured findings:
{claim, evidence, severity, how_to_verify} - Every finding must cite re-checkable evidence — a cell, a query, a row count, a quoted figure. A finding that cannot be re-checked is an opinion and dies at the ruling.
Tier 2 — sequential passes (subagents available, no parallelism)
Same lenses, run one at a time, each with a fresh, deliberately cleared context. Do not let a later pass see earlier findings; that is what makes them independent rather than sequential agreement.
Tier 3 — single-context structured review (most restricted seat)
You run every lens yourself, explicitly and one at a time, writing findings down before moving to the next lens. This is weaker than Tiers 1-2 and you should say so in the output — but it is far stronger than one undirected read, because naming the lens forces a specific search rather than a general impression.
Discipline that makes Tier 3 work:
- Write the lens question down first, verbatim, before looking at the work.
- Hunt only for that failure. Do not fix anything, do not assess overall quality.
- Record findings before switching lenses, including "nothing found for this lens."
- Never skip a lens because an earlier one found something big. The lenses are orthogonal; a big finding in one says nothing about the others.
- Rule at the end, in a separate pass, against the pooled list.
The ruling
Findings are not conclusions. Rule on each:
| Verdict | Meaning |
|---|---|
| CONFIRMED | Evidence re-checked and reproduces. Must be fixed before release |
| PLAUSIBLE | Cannot be reproduced with available information, but the mechanism is real. Record it as a known unknown in the deliverable |
| REFUTED | Re-check shows the concern does not apply. Record why, so the next review does not re-litigate it |
Then one of three outcomes:
- PASS — no CONFIRMED findings. Release, with any PLAUSIBLE items disclosed.
- PASS WITH FIXES — CONFIRMED findings fixed, fixes verified, release.
- BLOCK — a CONFIRMED finding cannot be resolved. Do not release. State what is needed.
A quorum that finds nothing on its first run should be suspected. Either the lenses were too generic, or they were not genuinely trying to break the work. Re-run with sharper lenses before accepting a clean result on something material.
Output
QUORUM | July board pack revenue figures | Tier 2 (sequential, 4 lenses)
CONFIRMED (1)
Period adversary: ARR snapshot taken 2026-08-04 while the July period was still
open in NetSuite. Two contracts totalling $84K posted 08-05 with July effective
dates and are absent from the pack.
Evidence: NetSuite period status log; SuiteQL re-run 08-19 returns $4.904M vs
the $4.820M in the pack.
-> FIX: re-pull post-close, restate the ARR bridge and the scoreboard.
PLAUSIBLE (1)
Definition adversary: NRR uses a fixed cohort, but reactivations within 90 days
are counted as expansion rather than new. Defensible, but undocumented - if the
board benchmarks against peers who treat it as new, NRR reads ~2pts favourable.
-> Not blocking. Document the convention on the definitions page.
REFUTED (1)
Tie-out adversary: suspected double-count of the Contoso renewal across new and
expansion. Re-checked the ARR bridge detail - it appears once, in expansion.
Recorded so this is not re-litigated next quarter.
LENSES RUN: tie-out, period/cutoff, definition, downstream
LENSES NOT RUN: disclosure (no customer-level detail in this pack)
VERDICT BLOCK - the CONFIRMED period finding changes the headline ARR figure.
Re-run after the July restatement.
Tier 2 was used because parallel subagents are unavailable on this seat; the
reviews were sequential with cleared context, which is weaker than independent
parallel review.
Stating the tier and its limitation is required. A reader must know how strong the gate that passed this actually was.
Degraded mode
Tier 3 is the degraded mode, and it needs nothing but discipline. If you are the only reviewer in a single context, the value comes entirely from naming the lens before you look — that converts a vague "review this" into four specific searches.
Going deeper
This skill is the finance-facing instance of a general pattern. The full mechanics — lens design, the adversarial verify phase and how to read its survival rate, judge panels and dissent rulings, degradation tiers, plus a tested library for dedup/tallying/ruling/requorum diffing — live in the companion pack:
claude-quorum — 11 skills, runnable workflows,
tools/quorum-lib.mjs/plugin marketplace add Lukehle/claude-quorum
Its CALIBRATION.md records what the design is actually based on: a retrospective over ~21
production runs, in which the separate adversarial Verify phase was the measured differentiator
(survival uniform at ~86%) and dissent-honoring convergence was the only family-invariant.
Related skills
tie-out— the first lens's ammunitionfinance-guardrails— the release boundary this gate protectstoken-economics— why this substitutes for up-tiering on a restricted seatpipeline-change-control— where a CONFIRMED finding becomes a change recordstartup-board-pack— the pre-send checklist this gate backs