prepare-a-board-finance-pack

name	prepare-a-board-finance-pack
category	money
description	Prepare a board finance pack that connects reconciled results, forecasts, liquidity, risks, and requested decisions to controlled evidence. Use when directors need concise, comparable, and decision-ready financial information.

prepare-a-board-finance-pack

Make uncertainty and decision consequences visible without overwhelming the board.

When to use

• Use for regular board meetings, financing events, transactions, or emerging financial risk.
• Follow governance, privilege, market-disclosure, confidentiality, and records requirements.

Procedure

1. Confirm meeting date, audience, reserved matters, agenda, reporting period, materiality, distribution controls, and decision deadlines.
2. Lock definitions for financial statements and key metrics, including currency, scope, exclusions, and nonstandard measures.
3. Reconcile income statement, balance sheet, cash flow, equity, and supporting metrics to the approved ledger and close.
4. Present actual versus budget, forecast, and prior period with bridges for material price, volume, mix, timing, currency, and one-time movements.
5. Cover liquidity, runway, working capital, debt, covenants, capital allocation, tax, commitments, contingencies, and going-concern indicators.
6. Show forecast scenarios, assumptions, sensitivities, trigger points, management actions, and measured prior forecast error.
7. Summarize business-unit, product, customer, operational, regulatory, cyber, people, and concentration risks only where financially material.
8. State each requested decision with options, recommendation, financial effect, dependencies, authority, and consequence of delay.
9. Link every material number to a controlled source. Record preparer, reviewer, approval, version, and late changes.
10. Deliver securely, record questions and decisions, and reconcile approved actions into forecasts, minutes, and owner tracking.

Done

• A versioned board pack and control sheet record source links, definitions, reconciliations, scenarios, risks, decisions, reviewers, and distribution
• Ledger, cross-statement, metric, forecast, covenant, source, version, and action checks verify the pack before and after the meeting