Single source of truth
A single source of truth is an arrangement where each fact in a business — a stock level, a price, a customer address — is stored in exactly one authoritative place, and everywhere else reads it rather than keeping its own copy.
Also written: SSOTArabic: مصدر الحقيقة الواحد
The symptom of not having one
Meetings that begin by reconciling numbers. If two people arrive with different figures for the same thing and the first ten minutes go on establishing whose is right, the problem is not the reporting — it is that the fact has more than one home.
It is a decision, not a product
No system grants this. It comes from deciding, per kind of record, which system owns it, and then making every other system read rather than duplicate. That decision is usually harder than the software work that follows.
Copies are allowed; second originals are not
Caching a value for speed or reporting is fine. What breaks is a second place where the value can be edited, because now two edits can disagree and nothing decides between them.
Related terms
Questions people ask
No. It means each fact has one owner. Several systems can hold a customer record as long as one of them is authoritative and the others follow it.
With the records that cause the most arguments — usually stock, pricing and customer data — and name the owning system for each.
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