How to Design Reports That Executives Actually Use

Every finance person has spent a week building a detailed management report and watched an executive flick through it in four minutes and close it.

The problem usually isn’t the numbers. It’s that the report wasn’t designed for how executives consume information. That’s where financial storytelling comes in.

The instinct in finance is to be comprehensive: show all the metrics, include all the variance analysis, the notes, the schedules. But an executive looking at a forty-page management pack doesn’t absorb forty pages of information. They scan for the things they care about, find them (or don’t), and form their view based on that.

Research on executive decision-making consistently shows that information overload doesn’t lead to better decisions – it leads to disengagement. The board members most engaged with their financial reporting are always the ones whose reports are concise and tell a story.

“I often try to keep things as simple as possible and then add detail,” says Adin Kenavan, Senior Accountant at HiSmile. “If you’ve got everything under the sun in front of someone, they’re going to glaze over and it’s not going to have the intended impact.”

‍

Start With the Questions, Not the Data

The starting point for any report design isn’t your chart of accounts or your existing template. It’s a conversation with the people who are going to read it.

Start with the five Ws: Who, What, When, Where, and Why. What do they care about? What decisions are they trying to make? What would make them feel confident about the state of the business? What would prompt them to ask aquestion?

At HiSmile, the finance team works closely with directors and key decision-makers, which means questions get asked and answered in real time throughout the month. By the time the report lands, the conversations have already happened. The report confirms what’s been discussed – it’s not a document full of surprises.

Not every business works that way. But the principle holds: design the report around the questions your audience is trying to answer, not aroundthe data you happen to have available.

‍

Structure It Like a Pitch

The most effective management reports are structured like a well-designed pitch. The most important information comes first. Detail is available for those who want it, but you don’t lead with it.

Think in terms of time. If an executive has five minutes with this report, what do they need to see? That’s your executive summary. Thirty minutes? That’s your core financial statements and key KPI analysis. An hour? That’s your supporting analysis and variance commentary.

“You want to almost tailor your report to have a five-minute, ten-minute, thirty-minute, hour-long pitch,” as Adin puts it. “If they’ve only got five minutes, you can just go – it’s all on page one.”

This structure also protects you when things go sideways. If the monthly catch-up gets cut short, you’ve covered the essentials. If you get more time than expected, you have the depth to fill it.

‍

Keep Only the KPIs That Matter

One of the most common mistakes in management reporting is including every KPI that might be interesting, rather than the ones that drive decisions.

A useful test: if the same metric appears month after month with no real commentary and nobody ever acts on it, it’s probably not a decision-makingtool – it’s just data.

The right set of KPIs is specific to the business and the stage it’s at. An e-commerce brand scaling into retail will care about different metrics than a professional services firm or a manufacturer. And the metrics that matter in a growth phase are often different from the ones that matter when focus shifts to profitability.

Start lean. Include only the metrics that directly connect to current strategic priorities. Add more when stakeholders ask for them. Remove anything that hasn’t prompted a question or a decision in the last six months.

‍

Make the Technology Work for the Design

One of the biggest constraints in management reporting has historically been the tool. In Excel, every design decision is a manual task. Want to change the layout? Rebuild it. New visualization? Build the chart, link the data, format it, embed it. Roll it forward to next month? Hope nothing breaks.

Modern reporting tools like Fathom are built differently. The design is separate from the data. You build the template once – the layout, the KPIs,the visualizations, the comparative periods – and data flows into it automatically from your accounting system. When you want to add a metric orchange a visualization, you change the template, not the underlying data.

That separation matters. It means you can invest time in designing a genuinely good report – one structured around how executives consume information – without the ongoing burden of maintaining it manually every period.

At HiSmile, moving to Fathom meant the team could build a report that looked exactly the way they wanted, then trust it would look the same way every month, updated automatically, without the risk of something breaking inthe rollover.

Good reporting isn’t about showing everything you know. It’s aboutmaking it easy for the people who matter to understand the things that mattermost. That’s a design problem as much as an accounting one – and it’s one worthsolving properly.

Watch Adin Kenavan’s Ask an Expert session to hear more from the Senior Accountant at HiSmile

Want to see how Fathom could better your management reports? Start your free trial.