FP&A Stories - 📊 The 5 slides your CFO actually reads
Hello Reader 👋I must admit: I'm not as regular as I wish I were with this newsletter. It has been a busy month. Since the beginning of the month I have been on the road quite a bit, with trainings, client sessions and very little time at my desk. One of those stops was London, where I gave a training. My friend Nicolas Boucher happened to be giving a training in the same place, and neither of us had planned it. So we did the obvious thing and spent a great dinner together. In my session, as always, we had a long discussion about which slides make it into the monthly deck and which ones stay out. Every slide feels important to the person who built it, and everyone worries that if one is left out, somebody will ask for it in the meeting. That discussion stayed with me, so I prepared a video on the only 5 slides you need to convince your CFO and the rest of the executive team. So take a coffee, sit down and read FP&A Stories just like 16k other readers 📊 The 5 slides your CFO actually readsYour monthly deck is doing two jobsEvery month you send the executive team a deck, and every month that deck tries to be two documents at once. The first is what I call the report: long, detailed, appendix-heavy, the one executives open before the meeting to dig into the numbers. The second is the presentation: the live document that you use during the meeting and that helps people understand what happened and what to do about it. When one file carries both jobs, nobody reads it properly beforehand, and the meeting turns into a page-by-page walkthrough. Finance spends the hour narrating, and the decision gets whatever time is left. After sitting through a lot of executive meetings, I can tell you the presentation only needs five slides. Everything else belongs in the report. The five slides, and the mistake I see on each1️⃣ The executive summary comes first. It carries your point of view on the whole month in one headline sentence, and the mistake I see most often is a summary written like a table of contents. 2️⃣ The waterfall comes second. Most of them are built on the usual accounting categories, which tell nobody anything in the four seconds you have before the room starts reading. 3️⃣ The deep dive comes third. The answer to "why did the number move" can stop too early, and where it stops says a lot about the kind of finance partner you are. 4️⃣ Risks and opportunities take the fourth slide. A risk with no probability next to it gives an executive nothing to decide on. 5️⃣ The ask closes the deck. A single line saying "we recommend option X" is where most recommendations stall, and the reason sits in how the other functions hear a recommendation from finance. Where FP&A startsSlides one and two look the same in a good controlling deck. Slides three, four and five are where finance earns its seat at the table, and that is where the video spends most of its time. I walk through all five in about seven minutes, with what to put on each one. The template is free, so you can lay out your next monthly deck on the same five slides. ▶️ Watch the video: click here 📥 Download the free 5-slide template: https://soufyan-hamid.ck.page/bd5f3708aa Final Thought Monthly decks grow by addition. A slide appears whenever someone asks a question, and nobody ever deletes one, so after a couple of years the deck documents every conversation the team has had. Five slides works as a test. If the executive team read only those five, would they leave the room knowing what happened, what it means and what to decide? Hit reply and tell me which slide in your current monthly deck you could delete tomorrow without anyone noticing. 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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