Confidence labels that operations teams actually use
Observed, inferred, incomplete — three stamps that keep resource consumption findings usable when the board asks for certainty.
A findings pack without confidence labels invites people to treat every row as equal. In applied resource consumption analytics, that habit causes bad capital sequencing.
The three stamps
Observed — read from a meter, invoice line, or witnessed operating state during the assessment window.
Inferred — calculated from a stated assumption (area share, typical load factor) that the reader can reject.
Incomplete — the question matters, but the evidence does not yet support a number.
How supervisors use them
In workshops, we ask participants to pick one incomplete item they can fix with a habit or a logger, and one inferred item they refuse to act on until it becomes observed. That exercise beats handing out a poster of tips.
How finance uses them
Finance partners tend to accept inferred figures for directional planning and insist on observed figures for lease schedules. Writing the distinction once saves three clarification emails later.
We would rather leave a cell blank with an incomplete stamp than publish a tidy percentage that collapses under the first landlord question.