In this video, Ciaran outlines how to effectively present financials in your team or board meeting. Keeping it to a one-pager is key, the detail can sit below.

How’s it going? Nice to see you. Now, you may have a Board or Investors or just a leadership team meeting that you like to review and present financials at. It’s worth bearing in mind that, when you’ve got a number of people sitting around a table or on a Zoom call, you want to control what people are looking at. So it’s far easier if everyone can be looking at just one page of the key financial outputs of last month, or the year to date, or how you’re doing against your forecast. You could always have the detail sitting behind but the one-pager can have everybody, literally looking at the same page. The detail sitting below is just there for reference. If you don’t have the one-pager, and you find that everyone else is just doing page-turning, looking through banks and banks of numbers, very quickly, the whole meeting starts to become unstructured as to what are the key issues that you and your team should be looking at. See you on the next one.

Ciaran is a VirtualFD or freelance finance director for early stage companies. He’s on a mission to help business owners like you to Own Your Numbers. He won FD/CFO of the Year at the 2019 British Accountancy Awards.