Revenue, costs, margin and cash against budget each month, for a leadership team.
The finance pack most leadership teams get is a spreadsheet with forty rows and no opinion. This page has the other kind: a month and a year against budget on one screen, with the variances explained in sentences. Its numbers were typed in after the books closed. They aren't live data, and the dashboard says so beside the close date.
Who it's for
A finance lead, controller or founder who closes the books each month and sends the result to the few people who run the company. They want to know if the month was good, why it differed from plan, and if there's enough cash.
The data is written into the page, so it shows the month you closed and nothing after it. Readers who need today's bank balance, or want to click from a total down to an invoice, need accounting software with a live connection.
What a good one contains
- The month in words first. The sample says December sales beat budget by $14k, profit fell $15k short, and why.
- Four headline figures, no more. Revenue, gross margin, operating profit and cash. Each tile gives the variance and the budget it's measured from.
- Sums that reconcile on screen. A bar splits each dollar of sales into cost of goods, operating costs and profit, with the subtraction written underneath.
- Month and year to date on one switch. December alone looks like a miss. The year shows operating profit $28k ahead of budget.
- Variances in sentences. Cost of goods ran $24k over: about $7k from selling more, and $17k of air freight on a late shipment. A table shows the gap. Only you know what caused it.
- Colors that mean better or worse. Marketing over budget is amber and people costs under budget are mint, so nobody reads a rising cost as good news.
- Cash as a bridge. Opening balance, profit, stock, equipment, loan repayments, closing balance. The year's low point, $411k in October, sits beside a stated floor of $350k.
Paste the monthly figures in once and have every total, margin and variance calculated from them. Type the year-to-date tile separately from the monthly bars and one day they will disagree in front of the CEO.
The sample works in whole thousands, so $594k less $297k less $217k is exactly $80k. Mixed rounding leaves a column a thousand out, and a room that stops trusting the page.
Define your lines at the bottom: here, operating profit is before interest and tax. Add the close date, so nobody compares it with a bank balance from a week later.
How to send it
To named people. It shows margins, what you spend on people and the bank balance. Open it to the leadership team's addresses, and add a board member's when they ask to see it.
Every page you publish gets one link that opens in any browser. You choose who can open it: anyone with the link, anyone with the password, or only the people and company domains you name, who sign in with Google or Microsoft. Change the page later and the link stays the same.
