FP&A Stories - 📊 How a 2-day budget review took half a day
Hello Reader 👋Among all the questions I get from my clients, there’s one that comes back in almost every training: “How do we get away from our monthly template?” You probably know the routine: you open last month’s deck, update the numbers, refresh the charts and change a few comments, and month after month, it’s the template that decides what you say. So this week, I’m sharing my new video on how to take back control of your monthly presentation before you even open PowerPoint. So take a coffee, sit down and read FP&A Stories just like 16k other readers 📊 Why your management stopped looking at your monthly deckWhy the template always winsLet’s be fair with the template, because it exists for good reasons. It’s consistent, it’s fast, and your management is used to it. The problem is its order. It follows the P&L (revenue, then margin, then costs), so every month the story is told in finance’s language while your audience thinks in business events like a customer, a launch or a price change. I saw an extreme version of this when I was Head of FP&A as a freelancer. The budget review template was a line-by-line review of every single assumption in the model, and the ExCo spent its time validating them one by one. Message first, slides lastThe way out starts before PowerPoint. You decide your message first, then you build the story, and only then do you open the slides. I keep repeating it: you can present something without visuals, but the visuals won’t present themselves. Once the message comes first, the template becomes a support you adapt to your story, and you stop filling boxes. What the business wants to hearSo what makes a finance presentation interesting for the business? It comes down to three things: 1️⃣ It talks about them, starting with the business event that moved this month 2️⃣ It shows what changed and what it means for the people listening 3️⃣ It tells them what to do, ending with the decision you need The video also covers how to bring options with their impact on the forecast, the habit that keeps your meeting to five to seven slides, and how that two-day budget review ended up taking half a day. ▶️ Watch the video: click here Final Thought The monthly template feels safe because nobody ever gets blamed for following it. After a few months, it is also the reason nobody remembers what you said. When I reversed that budget review, the discussion finally went to the three assumptions that carried the biggest risk for next year, and we were done in half a day. Open last month's deck and look at the first slide. Hit reply and tell me what it shows today. I read every message and reply to all of them. That's a wrap for this week See you next week! P.S. After 17 years in FP&A, Consulting and Leadership, I’ve coached and trained finance teams across industries, from consulting and manufacturing to tech, media, and global logistics. If you want to sharpen your own storytelling skills or bring this work into your team, here are a 3 ways can work together:
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