What happens when spatial data and financial data share one screen?

Totals turn into comparisons by place. Revenue, cost, volume and margin, usually reported for the business or the month, become figures for each stand, block, sale or property, side by side on a map. Two things show up before any insight does: transactions that can't be placed, because they carry no stand or sale key, and places whose figures disagree with another record of the same ground. Those checks don't need a map, and a per-property table would show them too. What the map adds comes after, in questions that depend on distance, roads and neighbours, such as what haul costs by block.

What the usual answer says

The pages that rank for this question promise a complete picture: forest assets and finances together, better decisions, costs and returns visible by location. Finance has a name for the idea. The Spatial Finance Initiative, a university research programme, describes spatial finance as "the integration of geospatial data and analysis into financial theory and practice". It adds that "Spatial finance offers insights at the level of individual physical assets, linking financial instruments to activities in the real economy".

For a forest business, the individual physical assets are stands and properties, and the financial records are loads, contracts, settlements and costs. Linking them is where the work is.

What shows up first

The first thing is transactions without a place. A cost booked to a general code, a haul payment with no sale number, or a settlement that names a contract but not the block can't go on the map. How many there are, and how much money they carry, is the first measure of how ready the records are.

The second is places whose figures disagree. Once each property carries a total, it can be compared with another record of the same ground: the timber sale documents, the cruise, the scale records. A business-wide total can hide an under-count on one property. A per-property view is what makes such a gap visible.

The third is places with no money: stands or sale areas that carry no transactions over the period. Some are idle. Others were harvested, and their loads were booked under a neighbouring key or a retired one.

What the map adds

Once transactions are placed and per-place totals agree, the map answers questions a table can't. The clearest is haul. A university's ongoing survey of log hauling costs in one timber region, updated for 2023, found a mean hourly rate of $130, down 5.5% since 2021. Its cost model assumes trucks cover the first 10 miles on gravel at 10 mph and the rest on secondary roads at 55 mph, at 5.4 miles a gallon. On those assumptions, a mile of gravel takes more than five times as long as a mile of paved road. Two blocks the same distance from the mill can have very different haul costs, and only the road network on a map shows which is which.

Set against revenue by block, that turns into the question a forest owner can act on: which blocks return the least per tonne after haul? A combined view built on clean keys answers it with a summary a person can check.

Quarri's own map features are in design, not delivered. This piece describes the combination in general.

How to prepare

Before building the view, count the transactions that carry no stand, block or sale key, and total the money they represent. Then take a sample of properties and compare each property's total from the ledger with its total from an independent record. The first count shows how much work the keys need. The comparison shows whether per-place figures can be trusted once they are on the map.

When it doesn't apply

A business whose transactions already carry a clean stand or sale key, checked against the map, can go straight to the questions. A business that sells standing timber in a few large sales a year may find a table does the job, since haul is the buyer's cost. And some costs are business-wide, such as head office, and belong in an allocation rule rather than on any one stand.

Quarri for forest management is built around how a forest operation runs, from the cruise to the settled account.

Quarri is an AI-native data platform for the timber supply chain. It connects buying, production, sales and inventory for forest management, sawmill, wood products and pulp, paper and packaging operators.