At the Strategic CFO Forum on Monday, Sandra Beaver, CFO of Evolus, a maker of scientific skincare products, said this year her company’s six-person data warehouse team is helping launch a single, integrated interface to all of the organization’s data. For a CFO, that’s part of the technology holy grail — a single source of truth.

Evolus’s accomplishment is inspiring, but it also reminded me of the pre-streaming TV commercial for telecom carrier Qwest that ran in 1999. The weary, dust-covered traveler asks the girl at the front desk of a battered roadside motel about in-room entertainment options. She nonchalantly replies, “every room has every movie ever made in every language, anytime, day or night." It was a fantasy because it assumed the power of fiber optic networks would overcome the realities of licensing fees, royalties, and other messy legal issues with delivering content.

For some CFOs, a single source of truth may seem like a fantasy, but it’s more attainable than Qwest’s film fan dream. Today’s story by reporter Adam Zaki digs into the fundamental issue preventing more companies from reaching the truth — at present, many finance teams knowingly make decisions based on inaccurate or incomplete data. Tackling and fixing data quality problems has to be the first step of any organization seeking to have its executives or even manager-level employees be data-driven decision-makers. It’s the messy reality intruding on the fantasy that the latest business technology promises, and it has to be dealt with.