What Goes in a Monthly Board Package (and How to Build It from QuickBooks Online)
A good package answers three questions: how did we do, why, and what needs a decision. QuickBooks Online has the data. It doesn't build the package. Here's what goes in one, and how to stop rebuilding it by hand every month.
A board or an owner doesn't want your general ledger. They want to know where performance changed against plan, what caused it, and what you need from them. The package is the document that answers those questions the same way every month, so the conversation can start at the interesting part.
QuickBooks Online produces the raw statements, but a package built from them takes real work, and that work repeats every month. Here is a layout that holds up.
The sections, in order
| Section | The question it answers | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Summary page | What are the three to five things I need to know? | You write it, from the sections below |
| P&L vs budget (and forecast, last year) | Are we on plan, and where are we off? | Profit and Loss and Budget vs Actuals, rolled up into the categories your board uses |
| Balance sheet | What do we own and owe, and what moved? | Balance Sheet report |
| Cash flow | Where did the cash go? | Statement of Cash Flows |
| KPIs | Is the business healthy beneath the P&L? | Calculated from P&L and balance sheet lines (margins, DSO, DPO, cash conversion cycle and the rest of the 12 working-capital KPIs, plus your own custom KPIs) |
| Receivables and payables | Who owes us, whom do we owe, how old is it? | A/R and A/P aging reports |
| Variance commentary | Why did the big lines move? | You, one or two sentences on each of the largest variances |
| Items needing attention | How solid are these numbers? | Your close review: open errors, uncategorized items, anything still unresolved |
| Outlook and decisions | Where are we heading, and what do you need from the board? | Your forecast and your judgment |
Four rules that make a package work
- Roll up to the board's categories, not your accounts. A board reads "Trade spend" or "Logistics," not eleven GL accounts. The roll-up is where most of the manual work lives. (Why mapping matters.)
- Same layout every month. If the structure changes, the board spends the meeting reorienting.
- Lead with variances, keep detail one step away. Put the largest variances up front and the supporting detail in an appendix, so a question never turns into "I'll get back to you."
- Show how solid the numbers are. A short list of open issues at the end tells the board which figures are still soft. It also forces a real close review before the package goes out. (See 15 checks to run before you close.)
Building it by hand
The usual route: export the P&L, Budget vs Actuals, balance sheet and cash flow from QuickBooks Online into Excel, map accounts to your categories with lookups, calculate the KPIs, paste the results into a template, write the commentary, and save a PDF. It works, and it's a few hours of mechanical work that repeats every month for every entity. It also breaks in predictable ways: a new account that wasn't mapped, a renamed account, a layout that drifts between months, a pasted number that goes stale.
If you serve several clients or entities, you're doing this once per client, and each one has its own quirks.
Where DrillFi fits
DrillFi generates the package from the same mapped data you see on screen, so it always matches the dashboard. You set it up once per company, then produce it each period.
- You choose the sections. One or several P&L views (for example, categories against budget, and detail against last year, with the full-year budget and budget left on the year-to-date block if you want them), balance sheet (this month, last month and the same month last year, with changes), cash flow, KPIs, subledgers (A/R and A/P aging, sales by item and sales by customer, each on its own page, with this month and year to date against last year) and items needing attention.
- It carries your brand. Firm name, logo and accent color are set once per client, so what you hand over looks like yours.
- KPIs print as you built them, as a number, a chart or the full calculation.
- Open issues go last, either summarized by type or with the individual transactions listed. With sign-off turned on, the page also shows how many are still open and which ones your team reviewed.
- PDF, plus an Excel export. The PDF package is ready to hand over. For a version you can keep working in, the dashboard also exports the report to Excel, with summary and detail tabs and live variance formulas, so it still recalculates.
It doesn't write your commentary or decide your outlook. Those are your job, and they're the part that makes a package worth reading. See the package on a sample company, or download a full sample package (PDF, 13 pages).
Keep reading
Stop rebuilding the package every month.
Set the sections and your branding once. DrillFi builds the PDF package from your mapped QuickBooks data each period, with open issues listed at the end.
See the package in the demoor apply for early accessQuickBooks menus, report names and plan features change over time, and this post describes them as of its publish date. Intuit and QuickBooks are registered trademarks of Intuit Inc. Used with permission. DrillFi is not affiliated with or endorsed by Intuit.