What a board pack should contain

A board pack has one job: to let the people responsible for the business make decisions on numbers they can trust. Most packs fail that test not because they are too short but because they are too long, too late, or built on a ledger nobody has reconciled. Here is what a good one contains, and what it leaves out.

The one-page summary

Open with a single page that answers the questions the board actually asks. Revenue for the month and the year to date against budget and the prior year. Gross margin. Operating expenses. Net profit. Cash at bank and the movement since last month. Receivables and payables. If a director reads nothing else, this page should tell them whether the business is on plan and whether cash is a problem.

The profit and loss by month

Not a single column for the month, but every month of the financial year side by side, with last year alongside. Trends are invisible in a one-month view and obvious in a twelve-month one. Group the lines into the categories the board thinks in (sales, cost of sales, people, premises, technology, everything else) rather than the two hundred accounts the bookkeeper thinks in.

The balance sheet, and proof that it ties

Cash, receivables, payables, loans and equity, month by month. Then a reconciliation line: opening net assets plus the profit for the month equals closing net assets. If it does not, something in the ledger is wrong, and the P&L above it cannot be trusted. This is the part most packs skip, and it is the part that catches errors before they reach the accountant.

Cash and working capital

Cash at bank, debtor days, creditor days and months of cash cover at the current burn. For a growing business this is the page that matters most, because profit and cash move apart as you grow. A rolling twelve-month cash flow forecast belongs here too, updated every month rather than rebuilt once a year.

Sales by customer

The top ten customers by revenue and their share of the total. Concentration risk shows up here long before it shows up in the P&L.

Points for the board

Four to six sentences, written by whoever prepared the pack, on what changed, why, and what decision is needed. Numbers without commentary get skimmed. Commentary without numbers gets argued with. Together they get acted on.

What to leave out

The full general ledger. A separate spreadsheet for every department. Slides. Anything that was true last month and has not changed. The test for every page is whether a director could make a different decision because of it. If not, it belongs in an appendix or nowhere.

How often, and how fast

Monthly, within ten working days of month end. A pack that arrives six weeks late is a history lesson. The way to hit that deadline every month is to stop rebuilding the pack by hand: connect it to the ledger so the numbers refresh themselves and the only work left is the commentary.