Middlemen fail on paperwork. So the paperwork is the product.

A sourcing desk lives or dies on whether everyone trusts the record: who found what, who introduced whom, what moved, what is owed. Here is exactly how ours works. It is boring on purpose.

The desk ledger

Every engagement in our book carries four things from the day it opens:

Record	What it holds	Why it exists
Origination	Who opened the door on this engagement, with the evidence: the email, the referral, the intake answer.	So attribution is a fact, not a memory. We ask every new contact how they found us and we write the answer down.
Introduction record	The dated artifact of each buyer-shop introduction we make.	Commission agreements have tails measured in years. A dated record is what makes them honest in both directions.
Quote and PO trail	References for every quote and order tied to the engagement.	Commission is computed from what actually moved, never from estimates.
Statement	A quarterly statement per counterparty showing the engagement, the evidence, the math.	You see why every line counted. Questions about any line get answered with a document, not a story.

The rules we hold ourselves to

Estimates are labeled as estimates, with the method beside the number, so you can reject the method instead of trusting the number.
Customs-record analysis is our own work product. We never republish another vendor's raw records.
No client's name appears anywhere public without written permission.
Government contracting work runs on separate rails entirely, with its own compliance regime, and never touches this desk's commission book.
When we are wrong, the correction goes in the record next to the error.

Why we built it this way

Because the people we work with check. Purchasing managers audit. Shop owners remember who wasted their time. The reshoring movement runs on documented cases, not vibes. A desk that expects to be audited keeps different books than one that hopes nobody asks, and we intend to be around long enough to be asked.