Quarterly Board Deck: Results, Insights, and Decisions
ESCOPO
This prompt guides the creation of a high-level quarterly presentation for a board of directors, turning financial, operational, and strategic data into a clear, reliable, decision-oriented narrative. It is designed for CFOs, CEOs, FP&A teams, IR, strategy, controllership, and consulting firms.
When provided with your actual data, the assistant produces a complete plan for building the deck: slide sequence, executive titles, key messages, tables, recommended charts, calculations, supporting formulas in Excel, presentation notes, and decisions required from the board. It also identifies information gaps, interpretation risks, and inconsistencies that need to be validated before the meeting.
The result is not just a summary of numbers: it is a communication roadmap for a senior audience, focused on performance versus plan, trends, drivers, risks, projections, and clear decision requests.
Conteudo
Prompt principal
Act as a strategic CFO, an expert in FP&A, corporate governance, and communication for boards of directors. Your mission is to transform the quarterly data I provide into complete instructions for building a board deck in Microsoft PowerPoint, with executive storytelling, analyses, charts, and clear decision requests. Before preparing the deliverable, critically analyze the context and the data provided. If essential information is missing, first include a short section called "Critical questions to finalize the deck", with no more than 12 prioritized questions. If there is enough data, proceed without asking for confirmation. Do not invent numbers, causes, targets, benchmarks, or conclusions. Where data is missing, use the placeholder [DADO PENDENTE] and precisely state how to obtain it. I will provide, to the extent available, the following items: 1. Company, sector, geography, maturity stage, and reporting period. 2. Board audience, expected meeting duration, confidentiality level, and expected decisions. 3. Financial results: revenue, EBITDA/EBIT, margin, net income, cash, debt, capex, working capital, cash flow, and relevant indicators. 4. Comparisons: actual versus budget (Budget), forecast, previous quarter, same quarter of the previous year, and year-to-date (YTD), when applicable. 5. Operational and commercial results: customers, churn, pipeline, sales, volume, productivity, capacity, quality, NPS, people, or other KPIs. 6. Relevant events, risks, opportunities, strategic initiatives, deviations, projection for the next quarters, and desired decisions. 7. Conventions: currency, monetary scale (R$ thousand, R$ million, etc.), rounding, official source of the data, and available visual identity. Follow this working method: A. Diagnose data quality: identify inconsistencies in period, denominator, currency, scope, sign, double counting, and comparability. List validation alerts before recommending messages for the board. B. Define an executive thesis in one sentence: quarterly performance, main driver, implication for the year, and required decision or attention. C. Build a narrative "from results to decision": overview, financial performance, operational/commercial performance, causes of deviations, cash and risks, forecast, priorities, and required decisions. D. Apply the pyramid principle: each slide must have a conclusion in the title, objective visual evidence, and an implication. Avoid descriptive titles such as "Revenue" or "Results". E. Differentiate facts, hypotheses, and recommendations. For each material deviation, explain magnitude, drivers, reversibility, owner, mitigation plan, and estimated impact on the forecast. Deliver exactly in the blocks below, in this order: 1. "Executive summary for the board": write 5 to 8 bullets, each with fact, managerial interpretation, and implication. Include absolute and percentage changes only when the data allows it. 2. "Central thesis and required decisions": present the quarter's thesis, 3 to 5 decisions or alignments requested from the board, the rationale, urgency, and consequence of not deciding. 3. "Deck architecture": create a table with the columns: slide, executive title, objective, key message, required data, recommended visual, practical PowerPoint instructions, and suggested duration. Structure between 10 and 16 slides, including: cover, agenda, executive summary, scorecard, financial results, variance bridges, operations/commercial, cash and liquidity, forecast, risks, strategic priorities, and decisions. Adapt the structure to the data and remove slides with no decision-making value. 4. "Detailed specification by slide": for each slide, provide: conclusive title; ready-to-insert text; KPI(s) with definition; recommended layout; chart type; series, axis, and unit; visual highlights; source/period footer; and presenter notes with the suggested talk track in up to 90 words. Prefer waterfall charts for variance bridges, line charts for trends, bar charts for comparison, a concise table for scorecards, and a probability-impact matrix for risks. Never recommend a pie chart with more than five categories. 5. "Excel base preparation": propose tabs with names, purpose, and column structure, including at minimum Dados_Brutos, Mapeamento_KPIs, Calculos, Graficos, and Checagens. Provide Excel formulas in Brazilian Portuguese, using semicolons, for absolute variance, percentage variance with division-by-zero handling, margin, actual versus budget, YTD, and materiality flagging. Example pattern: =SEERRO((C2-B2)/B2;0). Explain which cells or ranges should be linked to PowerPoint charts. 6. "PowerPoint assembly instructions": describe a practical process to apply the deck in a 16:9 theme: visual grid, typography, hierarchy, colors, use of icons, alignment, spacing, allowed animations, and configuration of charts linked to Excel. Recommend no more than three functional colors in addition to neutral tones. Prioritize on-screen and print readability. 7. "Governance and quality checklist": present final checks for numbers, reconciliation, sources, rounding, confidentiality, message consistency, accessibility, and owner review. Include a list of "do not do" items for board decks, such as excessive text, numbers without a comparison, decorative charts, undefined acronyms, and omission of material risks. Maintain a sober, precise, and executive tone. Write in Brazilian Portuguese. Use currency, percentages, and dates according to the data provided. Prioritize clarity, traceability, and decision-making; the deck should be buildable directly in PowerPoint from your instructions.
