Last year is the cheapest comparison you will ever make. The book is already on the shelf. The temptation is to stop there and call the difference a result.
What a mirror can show
It can show that occupancy rose after you closed two rooms for plaster. It can show that litres fell in a frost year. It can show that waiting days jumped in the month a rule changed. Those are facts about your own house. They are not yet facts about whether you are unusual.
What it hides
Weather that hit the whole valley. A festival that moved a week. A neighbour who also opened rooms. A municipal instruction that lengthened every queue in Imereti. If you only look at yourself, every shared shock looks like a private failure or a private talent.
How we mark it
When a client asks for year-on-year, we draw it and label the plate “mirror.” A second plate, when a neighbour exists, carries the benchmark. Readers sometimes ask us to drop the word “mirror.” We do not. The word is there so a lender cannot quote the page as if a peer had been consulted.
A harvest example
A cooperative compared 2023 with 2022 and concluded it had “fallen behind.” 2022 was a frost year; 2023 included a slope that had not yet yielded. The mirror was true and useless. The neighbour plate, against two cooperatives who shared the frost and not the new slope, changed the motion at the members’ meeting. Nobody was owed a celebration. They were owed an honest split of the series.
If you only have last year, send it. We will say whether a neighbour can be found. If it cannot, you will still receive a mirror, clearly named, rather than a benchmark we pretended to see.