What goes in a board pack for a growing business

Whether your “board” is a formal board of directors, a group of owners or an advisory panel, the monthly pack is where the business is steered. A good one is short, arrives on time, and ends with the decisions that need to be made. A bad one is sixty pages that arrive the night before and get skimmed.

What a useful board pack contains

1. A one-page summary

The most important page, and the one most often missing. In plain words: how the month went, what changed, what is at risk, and what the board is being asked to decide. If a director reads only this page, they should still be able to act.

2. A handful of key measures

Five to ten numbers that genuinely run the business: revenue, gross margin, cash, debtor days, pipeline, headcount, and whatever operational measures matter in your industry. Show each against budget and against the same period last year, and keep the same measures every month so trends are visible.

3. Profit and loss

Actual against budget and prior year, for the month and year to date, with short commentary on the variances that matter. Commentary should explain why, not restate the numbers.

4. Balance sheet and cash

The balance sheet, a cash flow summary and, for most growing businesses, a short-term cash forecast. Cash problems rarely appear first in the profit and loss.

5. Debtors and creditors

Aged debtors and creditors, with the largest overdue balances named. This is where early warning signs of both customer and cash-flow trouble show up.

6. Risks and compliance

A short register of the key risks, what has changed, and upcoming compliance deadlines such as tax, audit and insurance renewals.

7. Decisions required

Close with the specific decisions the board needs to make this month, with a recommendation for each.

What to leave out

• Every report the system can produce. Put detail in an appendix, or leave it out and answer questions when asked.
• Numbers without commentary. A table of variances with no explanation pushes the analysis onto the board.
• Anything that changes format every month. Consistency is what lets directors spot trends.

Stop rebuilding it every month

In many businesses the pack takes two days because it is rebuilt from exports every month: data pulled from the accounting system, pasted into spreadsheets, charted and formatted by hand. That is also where errors creep in.

The fix is to build the pack once, on a reporting model connected to your own data, so next month it refreshes rather than restarts. The commentary still needs a person; the tables and charts should not. A hand-built board pack is one of the most common reporting problems in growing businesses.

When the pack is late, the real problem is usually month-end

A board pack cannot be faster than the close behind it. If the pack is late because the numbers are late, start with our guide to speeding up month-end.

Our management reporting service builds the reporting pack, the dashboards and the board pack template on one set of numbers, so they agree with each other and stop taking days to assemble.