A question on Polkadot Treasury reporting: what is considered “canonical” for audits?

Ecosystem Digest
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Hello Polkadot community,

I’ve been reviewing a number of past Treasury proposals and post-mortems, and I keep running into a recurring question that I’m hoping Treasury participants can help clarify.

Polkadot has fully on-chain Treasury execution and OpenGov-based approvals, which is great.
However, when proposals later need to be reviewed, audited, or explained externally, the financial story seems much harder to reconstruct.

In practice, I often see situations where:

  • Multiple wallets are involved over time

  • Spend spans several price regimes

  • USD values differ depending on pricing source and timestamp

  • Different reviewers produce slightly different “total spent” numbers

This leads to a simple but surprisingly hard question:

When there are multiple reasonable ways to reconstruct Treasury spending, what does the DAO consider the “canonical” financial view?

Some concrete questions I’d love input on:

  1. For Treasury-funded teams:

    • What financial artifacts were you actually asked to produce after funds were spent?

  2. For Treasury reviewers:

    • When two analyses disagree, how do you decide which one to trust?

  3. For auditors / accountants:

    • What usually causes the most back-and-forth during Polkadot-related audits?

I’m not proposing a solution here — I’m trying to understand how the ecosystem currently resolves these ambiguities, or whether they’re simply accepted as part of on-chain systems today.

Any concrete experiences (even “this was painful”) would be extremely helpful.

Thanks in advance.

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Hello,
it can be indeed challenging to understand which projects have received how much money via refs and bounties in an aggregated way.
Please check OpenShore due dilligence tool and the aggregated project overview there: https://openshore.io/ It might help with some of your questions.
Anyways there are unfortunately no fixed reporting standards to the best of my knowledge or at least none which were continuously implemented by OpenGov participants . As for the analysis of the spending there is no right or wrong per se, however I would recommend to think of the spending more in direct spending terms (CF accounting) rather than accrual accounding due to the nature of payments.

However, some ecosystem members like PolkaWorld demonstrate good self-reporting practices, and products that received treasury funding with genuine long-term ecosystem commitment typically self-reported their progress (and financials).