Use cases › Board and QBR
The board update, built the same way every quarter.
Attach the quarter's numbers and last period's deck. You get a board pack in the order directors read it, with every figure traceable to the document it came from.
Fundraising happens once every year or two. A board meeting happens every quarter, for every company, forever, and the deck is due whether or not the quarter went well.
That regularity is the whole problem. The numbers change, the story changes, and the format is rebuilt from scratch anyway because last quarter's file is buried in somebody's downloads folder. Three days disappear into formatting work that nobody will remember.
A board pack is the best possible input for generated slides, because the source already exists. The figures are in the financial export, the commentary is in the operating review, and the decisions are in the agenda. The work is not inventing content. It is arranging content that is already written.
Grounded mode is why this works for a board
Attach the quarter's reporting and turn grounded mode on. The deck is then built under a rule: no figure, percentage, currency amount, date or quoted line appears on a slide unless it appears in the source. Anything the model cannot trace is removed, and you get told what was removed and why.
Grounded mode follows the shape of your document, producing roughly one slide per section. Ask for a fixed slide count or ask for grounded output, not both in the same breath.
What a good one contains
Six slides that earn their place, and what belongs on each.
The quarter in one line
What happened, stated as a claim a director could repeat in the hallway afterwards.
If the first slide is a table of contents, the meeting starts slow and never recovers.
Against plan Actuals next to the plan the board approved, with the variance called out rather than left to be spotted.
Boards forgive a miss. They do not forgive finding it themselves on slide nine.
The operating metrics The four or five numbers this company is actually run on, in the same order every quarter.
Changing which metrics appear is how a board learns to distrust the pack.
What we decided and what we are asking Decisions taken since the last meeting, and the decisions you need from this one.
A board meeting with no ask is a status update with a quorum.
Risks, with owners The three things most likely to be wrong, who is holding each, and what would change your mind.
Naming a risk before a director does is the cheapest credibility there is.
Appendix The detail behind every headline, so a question does not end the discussion.
Put the working here, not on the main slides. Directors who want it will find it.
How it goes
Last quarter's pack and this quarter's numbers
PDF, Word, PowerPoint, plain text or Markdown. The financial export and the operating review are usually enough.
Audience: Board of directors
The audience setting changes the register, not just the wording. A board deck argues. A sales deck sells.
Turn grounded mode on
Every number on the finished deck traces back to a line in what you attached, and the removals are listed.
PowerPoint, PDF or a share link
The .pptx has editable text boxes, so your CFO can adjust a figure at 9pm without asking anyone.
Before and after
Same content. One was written at 1am in a text editor.
Q3 Update
- Revenue was strong
- Some churn in the mid-market
- Hiring is on track
- Pipeline looks healthy
Four claims, no numbers, no comparison to plan. Every one of them invites a question the deck cannot answer.
Revenue 6% ahead of plan, churn concentrated in one segment
Q3 FY26 against the board-approved plan
One claim, three numbers that support it, and the bad news named on the same slide as the good.
Questions
Can it use last quarter's deck as the starting point?
Yes. Attach the previous pack as a PowerPoint file along with this quarter's numbers. It is read as a source document, which is how the new deck keeps the same section order. Note that reading a brand out of a .pptx is a separate thing and is not built yet, so the styling comes from one of the five built-in themes rather than from the old file.
How do I stop it inventing a number the board will ask about?
Turn grounded mode on. No figure, percentage, currency amount, date or quotation reaches a slide unless it appears in the document you attached, and anything dropped for being untraceable is reported back to you. That report is often the more useful output, because it shows which claims in your own reporting were never evidenced.
Can I ask for a specific number of slides?
You can, but not at the same time as grounded mode. Grounded output follows the shape of your source at roughly one slide per section, so its length comes from the document. Ask for a fixed count when you are generating freely, and use the length band when you are working from a source.
Will the CFO be able to edit a figure before the meeting?
Yes. The PowerPoint export writes real text boxes rather than pictures of text, so any number on a slide can be clicked and changed in PowerPoint, Keynote or Google Slides without coming back to us.
Is there a way to share it with directors who will not install anything?
Three ways. A share link opens in a browser, PDF is on every plan including the free one, and the single-file HTML export opens from a laptop with no network at all.