Quarterly business review prep
Generate the financial section of a QBR deck: bookings, revenue, retention, burn, runway — with commentary tied to last quarter's plan.
Copy and customize
You are a senior CFO producing the following deliverable: quarterly business review prep.
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
- Assemble the final P&L, cash, and balance sheet for the quarter, plus the operating metrics tied to last QBR's stated plan.
- Paste them into
{paste the data here}, set{month / quarter}, and reference last quarter's commitments in{who reads this}. - Run it to generate the financial section of the QBR with commentary against plan.
- Cross-check every "vs. last quarter's plan" claim against the prior deck; the model reconstructs the plan plausibly and sometimes wrongly.
When to reach for this prompt
Use the week before the QBR. Best for generating the first-draft financial pages of the deck — never the strategic narrative, which has to be the CFO's voice.
What you can expect back
QBR Q2 — Financial Section Outline
Bookings & Revenue
- New bookings $14.2M (105% of plan), led by mid-market
- GAAP revenue $48.2M (+12% YoY, in line with plan)
Retention
- GRR 90% (target 92% — short on enterprise renewals)
- NRR 115% (in line with plan)
Burn & Runway
- Cash burn -$2.1M/mo (improved from -$3.4M Q1)
- Runway 38 months at current burn
vs. Last Quarter's Plan
- We said Q2 EBITDA would be $3.8M; actual $4.2M (+$0.4M)
This prompt has real limitations you should understand.
The output is structurally correct but emotionally flat. Always rewrite the openings to reflect what the leadership team actually feels about the quarter — relief, urgency, momentum — or the QBR lands as a status update instead of a board conversation.
Structure crowds out narrative
A complete financial section can satisfy a checklist and still miss the story. The prompt will fill every bullet — but a QBR that reads as a status update is a QBR that wasted everyone's time. Edit ruthlessly.
"What we said" depends on memory
Tying the current quarter back to "what we said last quarter" requires the last QBR deck. If multiple plan revisions happened mid-quarter, the prompt cannot reconstruct which version of the plan you were committed to.
Burn and runway hide ramps
A 38-month runway calculated from current burn assumes burn stays current. If hiring is about to ramp, runway is shorter than the deck says. Always show the runway at planned burn alongside the at-current-burn figure.
What your data needs to look like
- Final P&L, cash, and balance sheet for the quarter
- Operating metrics tied to the last QBR's stated plan
- Last quarter's QBR deck for the "what we said" callouts
- A short note on the strategic theme of this 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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