The stone inside the cherry is small, hard, and contains the whole tree. Ipso is Cherrystone's process-analysis and simulation engine: your business reduced to its smallest set of true numbers, and everything you see grown from them. Every view in this gallery answers a question an owner would actually ask, states the data that feeds it, proves its own arithmetic on screen, and ends in one of nine verbs — never in a number. Nothing is stored.
Cherrystone Business Services intellectual property. The methodology, the view grammar, the intake contracts and every template in this gallery are the work and property of Cherrystone Business Services. All figures are synthetic and illustrative.
Most business dashboards are decoration: numbers copied from other systems, arranged to look busy, arguing with each other by Thursday. We build the opposite. Every view in this gallery was designed, built and tested against six rules — written here in plain language, because the whole point of our work is that you should not need an analyst to understand your own business.
Every view starts life as a sentence a real person would say out loud — "which limit stops us growing?", "where is the claim sitting still?" If we cannot phrase the question, we do not build the view. That question is printed on every card in this gallery, in italics, exactly as it would be asked.
Before anything is drawn, we agree the facts that will feed it — a short workbook with fixed columns, filled in from your systems and your people. Every view states its data contract: precisely which sheets and columns it needs. If it is not in the workbook, it is not on the screen. A visual that cannot say what feeds it is a picture, not a finding.
Underneath every business is a surprisingly small set of rates: what comes in, what is lost at each step, what splits where. In our reference build, the entire client-specific layer is fifteen numbers. Small is the point — fifteen numbers can be checked, argued about, and signed off. Fifteen thousand cannot.
Every figure on every screen is calculated live from those numbers, at the moment you look at it. Nothing is ever stored, so no two screens can ever disagree — there is no stored total for a computed one to contradict. Change one number and everything that depends on it moves together, instantly and visibly.
Every view must prove its own arithmetic on the screen itself — the balance line under each visual shows that what went in equals what came out, to three decimals. Every score carries a written reason a person can repeat in a meeting. And where two of your systems disagree, we show the disagreement rather than averaging it away — that log is often the most valuable thing an engagement produces.
Analysis that ends in a number is unfinished. Every view here terminates in one of nine verbs — invest, protect, optimise, sustain, fix, go, sequence, defer, reject — so the output of the work is a decision, not an observation. An engagement that never rejects anything never tested anything.
The engine is the set of rules that never change, in any industry: how impact fades as it travels, what counts as critical, the nine verbs. It is the same for a mussel farm and a bank, which is what makes every view in this gallery part of one product.
The industry pack is your sector's own language laid over the engine — your stages, your capabilities, how they depend on each other, your units and your vocabulary. Authored once per industry, by us.
Your overlay is the smallest layer and the only one that is yours alone: the rates and volumes of your business. In the reference build, fifteen numbers. Everything you see is grown from this seed — which is why this product is called Ipso.
Flow businesses move something physical through stages and lose a little of it at every step — food, freight, minerals, solar energy, medicine. We measure them in tonnes, hours, units and days, and every flow view must balance: in equals out plus everything accounted for in between.
Estate businesses run a landscape of capabilities and systems that depend on each other — banks, insurers, telcos, public bodies. We measure them in probability × impact, elapsed days and dependency weight.
And deliberately, no view is ever denominated in money. A rand figure is an argument; a counted tonne, day or touch is a fact. We show facts, and let your finance team put the rands on afterwards — theirs to own, ours to feed.
We interview owners, walk the floor, and fill the intake workbook from your systems. Nothing is modelled yet — this stage is entirely about agreeing what is true.
The pack comes alive with your numbers, and the first thing it produces is the Disagreement Log — every place two of your systems answer the same question differently. Clients consistently rate this the most valuable artefact we deliver.
The views go up. Each one ends in a verb, and the engagement closes on the Verdict Plane: every finding, tiered by the same thresholds, each flowing into what will actually be done about it.
Because everything derives from your overlay, keeping the picture current means updating a handful of numbers — monthly by our analyst, or continuously from your systems. Pull a lever in the simulator and watch your futures recompute.
It proves itself while you watch. Every visual prints its own balance check, on screen, every time it draws. We do not ask you to trust our arithmetic — we show it.
It grades its own evidence. Every finding is marked by how it is known: measured by a system, confirmed by two independent sources, or resting on one person's word — and single-source findings are flagged before you spend money on them.
It works with the door closed. This entire gallery is one file that opens with no internet connection. Your numbers never need to leave the room to be understood.
It cannot quietly drift. Stored numbers rot; derived numbers cannot. The day a figure on our screen disagrees with the arithmetic beneath it is the day the software has failed loudly — and it is built so that day cannot come quietly.
This is the gallery as it lands in a findings meeting: the whole library reduced to the decisions it terminates in. Nothing on this page is typed in — every count is derived live from the template registry the moment you open it, and the census at the bottom proves it. Click any cell to open that shelf of the library.
An industry is not "done" because it has a picture in it. It is done when it carries the same certified set every other industry carries — and this page derives that check live from the library rather than asserting it. A pack short of the standard is marked provisional and told exactly what it needs. The standard admitting its own gaps is the same discipline as a view printing its own balance.
Layer 1 is industry-invariant. No view in this gallery — or any view built from it — may alter it. Reproduced here so the gallery is self-documenting for whoever authors the next pack. One note on colour: the page chrome is Cherrystone's cherry and stone; the semantic palette inside every visual is Layer 1 of the engine, and it does not move.