Prepare a CFO monthly briefing
Turns the most recent closed month into a board-ready briefing: a short summary, the trends working for and against you, and questions to investigate.
The prompt
Copy and customize
prompt.txt
You are preparing a monthly briefing for a CFO.
Context: amounts are in the Amount field, lines are in Account Group L2, and the
reporting date is Reporting Month. Use the most recent closed month, with prior
months for context.
{financial_data}
Task: turn the month into a briefing a CFO can take into a leadership or board setting.
Output format:
- A three-sentence executive summary of the month's financial performance.
- The three most important positive trends, each with the figure behind it.
- The three areas that need attention, each with the figure behind it.
- Two specific, data-driven questions the CFO should investigate, each answerable
with data the company has.
- Where something looks alarming but could be a data artifact, frame it as a
question rather than a finding.
Open in
We’ll copy the prompt and open the chat.
How to use
Run it in four steps
- Export the most recent closed month from the Amount field by Account Group L2, with several prior months for context.
- Paste it into
{financial_data}. - Run it for the summary, the trends, and the two questions to investigate.
- Own the emphasis before forwarding; the model's sense of "most important" is generic, and one of its questions may need data from outside finance.
When to use
When to reach for this prompt
Use this right after close, to turn a finalized month into a one-page narrative for a leadership or board setting. The two-questions section is the part people underestimate; it is what makes the briefing a prompt for action rather than a recap. It works best once the underlying P&L and groupings are clean, and it should never run on provisional numbers, since the briefing becomes the version everyone remembers.
Example output
What you can expect back
CFO briefing — [Month]
Summary: Revenue came in at $1.82M, down 5% from May and the third soft month in a row, while OpEx reached a new high at $1.15M. Net income fell to $124K, roughly half of March's level. The pressure is on the cost side rather than the top line.
Working for us:
- Gross margin held at 70.0% despite the revenue softness.
- G&A came in about 6% under its run-rate.
- Collections improved, with DSO down roughly 4 days month over month.
Needs attention:
- OpEx has risen every month this half and is now up 14% vs. January.
- Revenue is down three months running; the trend, not the level, is the concern.
- Sales & marketing spend rose while revenue stayed flat, so efficiency is slipping.
Questions to investigate:
- Is the revenue softness slipped deals or lost deals? This would require pipeline stage data, which may sit outside the finance dataset.
- What is driving the monthly OpEx rise: headcount, software, or vendor creep?
Limitations · Worth knowing
This prompt has real limitations you should understand.
A briefing is a point of view, and a point of view is exactly what a language model will produce confidently whether or not the data earns it. Asked for "the three most important" trends, the model ranks and frames, and its sense of important is generic rather than tuned to a particular board. The dollar citations keep it honest on the facts, but the emphasis is an editorial choice the CFO should own before forwarding.
A single closed month is also a thin basis for a narrative. "Third soft month in a row" may be a genuine trend or three ordinary months inside a seasonally weak window, and the briefing states it as a story either way. The investigation questions then run into a reach problem: "slipped versus lost deals" needs pipeline data the finance dataset may not contain, so the most useful question may point outside the system entirely.
A briefing that holds up needs the month's financials reconciled and consistently grouped, set against enough clean history to tell signal from noise, and ideally joined to the operational data its questions imply. Assembling that context is the data-layer work behind the briefing, and it is what separates a narrative a CFO can defend from one that reads well and rests on a single noisy month.
Prerequisites
What your data needs to look like
- A finalized Amount by Account Group L2 for the most recent closed month
- Several prior months for trend context, on a consistent Reporting Month
- Stable account groupings across the comparison window
- Access, or a plan for access, to the operational data the follow-up questions imply
See it run on real data
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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