Turn the close pack into a board narrative
Convert a finalized close package into a 1-page CFO commentary — drivers, anomalies, and forward-looking watchpoints.
Copy and customize
You are a senior CFO producing the following deliverable: turn the close pack into a board narrative.
Context
- Workflow: Board & Stakeholder Comms
- Inputs available: {paste the data here}
- Period: {month / quarter}
- Audience: {who reads this}
What to produce
1. The headline takeaway in one sentence.
2. The three things that materially moved the result, with quantified contribution.
3. The one risk or anomaly worth flagging.
4. A short forward-looking note: what to watch next period.
Guardrails
- Use only the numbers provided; do not invent values.
- Cite a row reference for every claim.
- Flag anything you cannot reconcile rather than smoothing it over.
Run it in four steps
- Gather the finalized P&L and cash statement with year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter comparisons, plus the operating metrics your board tracks.
- Paste them into
{paste the data here}, set{month / quarter}, and in{who reads this}note what the board flagged last quarter so the narrative closes the loop. - Run it, then read the draft against the actual numbers to catch any driver the model inferred rather than read.
- Tighten the forward-looking section yourself; it is the part the board reads closest and the part the model hedges most.
When to reach for this prompt
Use after the close pack is finalized and reviewed by the controller. Best for the CFO's first draft of the board commentary — never the final version. You'll want a human pass to land tone and remove anything that reads as too defensive.
What you can expect back
HEADLINE
Q2 delivered $48.2M revenue (+12% YoY), with EBITDA margin expanding 280bps to 18.4%. Cash position improved to $96M after the credit facility paydown.
DRIVERS
- Net new ARR of $3.1M, weighted to mid-market (62% of new logos)
- Gross margin held at 76.4% despite hosting cost growth
- OpEx grew 8% vs revenue 12% — operating leverage starting to show
WATCHPOINTS
- Pipeline coverage for Q3 is 2.8x — below our 3.2x target
- Two enterprise renewals at risk worth $1.4M ARR combined
This prompt has real limitations you should understand.
The narrative reads as overly polished — that's the model. Always rewrite the headline in your own voice or it lands as boilerplate. Don't let it generate forward guidance; that needs the CFO's judgment, not pattern-matching.
Polished is not honest
The model defaults to clean, declarative prose. If your quarter was a near-miss, the narrative will sound like a steady-state result — leadership will read it that way, and the discussion in the boardroom will land in the wrong place.
Forward guidance is not pattern-matching
When the prompt extrapolates the next quarter from the current one, it skips everything the CFO knows that is not in the data — a deal at risk, a hire that fell through, an upstream customer issue. Always remove the forward-looking sentences and write them yourself.
Comparisons drift quietly
YoY and QoQ comps break when the business has restructured, divested, or recategorized. The prompt will compare anyway. Footnote every comparison that is not apples-to-apples or the board will ask the wrong follow-up question.
What your data needs to look like
- Finalized P&L and cash statement for the period
- Prior-period comparisons (YoY and QoQ)
- Operating metrics relevant to your business (ARR walk, headcount, etc.)
- A short note on what the board flagged last quarter
See how FinanceOS handles this prompt on real financial data.
Book a 20-minute walkthrough. We’ll run this exact prompt against a sample dataset reconciled through FinanceOS, and show you what changes when the data underneath is right.
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