Halfway through our May roundtable, one CFO described how his board pack comes together.
The sales director writes the sales section. The ops director writes ops. Marketing writes theirs. Finance owns the consolidation, the frame, and the consistency check.
A discipline he’d built over several roles. His reasoning seemed sensible…
“The pack is a finance project on a Word document. But the data and the story behind it belong to the business. Take it out of finance’s hands and the colour and ownership it picks up is enormous.”
Another attendee called it ‘the most obvious-in-hindsight thing I’ve heard in months’ and committed to changing how his next pack came together.
Why passing the pen matters
The shift is more than cosmetic.
When your sales director writes the sales section, they stand behind their forecast in front of the board. When they just feed data into a paragraph you wrote, they don’t. It’s easy to disown a number someone else wrote up. Its much harder when the words around it are yours.
Think about your pack today… If finance writes every section, the board is reading one author doing six voices. However good the writing, the colour drains out. And the accountability stays exactly where it’s always been. With you.
The day-four meeting
Several attendees described a similar cadence sitting underneath this.
Flash numbers land by day two or three of the new month. By day four or five, the whole exec team is in a room. Not to draft the board pack, but to talk through what happened, why, and what they’re going to do about it.
By the time anyone picks up a pen, the team is aligned on the story. Each function writes their section knowing it sits next to the others. The board reads one coherent picture instead of six departmental updates stitched together.
The empathy trap
One CFO raised something that gets less attention than it deserves. The risk of caring too much…
“Empathy can be a bad thing as a CFO. When you start reporting on your own numbers, you start marking your own homework. The best thing you can do is step back. Be the governor of the business, not the cheerleader for any one part of it.”
If you’ve been close to the sales team, you’ll soften the story when sales is missing. If you sat with product through the launch, you’ll overweight its early signals. Nothing dishonest in it. The pull of having been in the room is real, and it has to be managed.
The answer the group settled on was distance. Not coldness. Distance. You’re the one person who can stand a step back from every function and ask whether what’s being said about the numbers matches what the numbers actually say.
That’s the role only you can play. And you can’t play it while you’re holding everyone else’s pen.
What finance gets back
The FP&A Trends Survey 2025 found that only 2% of FP&A teams consider themselves fully optimised, and nearly half of FP&A time still goes on data collection and validation rather than insight.
Lay that alongside the roundtable and it starts to feel uncomfortable. A finance team that writes every line of the board pack, and owns every number underneath it, is a finance team with no time to think about what any of it means.
Sharing the pen shares the load. Done well, it makes the pack better. Done deliberately, it hands finance back the time to be the function the board actually needs.
Try this next month
Pick one section. Sales is the natural place to start.
Hand the pen to the person who owns the number. Give them the frame, the headline discipline, and a word limit. Keep the consistency check and the final read.
Then watch what happens in the boardroom when the forecast has its owner’s name on it.
And a question worth sitting with – Who actually stands behind the numbers in your pack… the business, or just you?
This is Part 3 of a short series drawing on our May roundtable, ‘Board Packs and the Narrative That Lands’. Part 1 covered the balance problem. Part 2 covered why a yellow flag in April beats a red flag in June. The final part covers the theme that ran underneath the whole session: the trust triangle between CFO, CEO, and chair.
The PE CFO Roundtable runs monthly. Free, peer-only, Chatham House Rules.Â
Register at www.core3.co.uk/pe-cfo-roundtable
