The monthly board pack: what goes in it, and how to produce the financial half without rebuilding it

Executive summary

One page: the headline figures, what moved, and what the board is being asked to note or decide. Written last, read first.

Management accounts

Profit and loss for the month and year to date against budget and last year; balance sheet; cash flow. The financial core of every pack.

KPIs

The handful of measures the business runs on — margins, debtor days, cash runway, and the operational ones only it would track — with trend.

Variance analysis and commentary

For each material movement: what, by how much, why, and what happens next. The part directors actually read.

Cash and working capital

Aged debtors and creditors, cash position and forecast, and any covenant or facility headroom.

Non-financial papers

Minutes, the CEO report, committee reports, risk and compliance updates. Outside the finance function, and outside this page.

The first five are finance’s. Of those, the management accounts, KPIs, ageing and commentary are computed from the same source — the month’s trial balance — and that is the part that can be produced rather than assembled.

The financial report for a board meeting is not the management accounts with a cover on. Directors have an hour before the meeting and a duty to understand the position, so the report runs in the order they need it: what the board is asked to note or decide, the headline figures against budget and last year, cash and headroom, and only then the statements.

Keep the commentary to the movements that change a decision — a margin that has slipped two months running, a large customer paying later, a facility getting close to its limit — and say what management is doing about each. A figure with no sentence beside it is one the board will ask about at the table, which is where commentary written against the figures earns its place.

In Australia and New Zealand the document is more often called the board report, and the financial half follows the same order as anywhere else: summary, profit and loss against budget and last year, balance sheet, cash flow, KPIs, aged debtors and creditors, commentary. What differs is the local detail directors look for in the cash and liabilities section:

• GST payable or refundable for the period, and in Australia PAYG withholding and superannuation owed; in New Zealand PAYE and KiwiSaver deductions owed.
• Cash at bank against the facilities available, so headroom is a figure rather than a feeling.
• Aged debtors with the largest few named, since collections are what most often turns into an action for the board.

Every one of those is a group of ledgers in the trial balance, so each is mapped once and refreshed every month like the rest of the accounts.

It can draft the words, and it should not write the figures. A language model handed a trial balance will produce a pack that reads well and adds up wrongly, and a board pack is the one document where a wrong figure is read by the people accountable for it.

In Magic MIS the AI maps the ledgers and drafts the commentary with a placeholder wherever a figure belongs; the engine fills the placeholders, and a draft holding a number of its own is rejected. The executive summary — what the board is being asked to decide — stays yours, because that is judgement about the business rather than about the books.

Ask a finance manager how long the pack takes and the answer is usually three to five working days after the close: a day pulling raw data and re-keying it into the pack’s spreadsheet, a day fixing the formulas the new month broke, a day writing commentary, and a day of review because a figure did not tie. The board sees the pack in the second week of the month, for a month that ended a fortnight ago.

Almost none of that is judgement. The judgement is the commentary and the summary; the rest is transcription and arithmetic, done by hand because the spreadsheet was built by hand.

1. 1. Take the raw trial balance

   From Xero, Sage, QuickBooks or any system, once the month is closed. Excel, CSV or PDF.

2. 2. Get the management accounts

   P&L, balance sheet, ratios, aged debtors and commentary, checked against the trial balance, in a workbook with live formulas.

3. 3. Bind the pack

   Take the statements from the workbook into the pack, add the executive summary and the non-financial papers, and present the dashboard live at the meeting.

The mapping from ledgers to report lines is learned from the first month and reused, so the second month’s accounts take minutes and make no AI calls when the ledger structure has not changed. Every figure carries its lineage, so “where does that number come from?” is answered before it is asked. See how it works for each step in detail.