The board deck
writes itself

Every month somebody rebuilds the same board deck by hand, out of a close export, a budget file and last month's deck that disagree. This is the brief that hands that job to Claude. Copy it, paste it into a new Claude conversation, and attach the files you already pull. It asks what your numbers mean before it drafts a single page.

The deck tells the board EBITDA is ahead of plan. The covenant certificate for the bank, prepared the same week from the same close, says it is behind. Both are right: the deck's line carries the addbacks and the bank's does not, and nobody in the room knows there are two numbers.

The numbers live in the accounting system, the budget spreadsheet, the covenant model and last month's deck, and the only thing able to reconcile them was somebody who knew which EBITDA carried the addbacks, which budget column the board was tracking, and which pages had been copied forward since spring. Claude reads those files directly, asks what your lines mean before it combines anything, and drafts every page headline first. The rebuild becomes a paste, and the person who knew what the lines meant writes it down once instead of doing it every month.

• The brief itself, in one block you copy or download, so what you hand Claude is exactly what you have read.
• The questions it asks before it drafts anything, including the one about what your EBITDA line actually includes and the one about which budget the board believes it has been tracking.
• The quality gate it holds itself to, and the rule that stops it filling in a figure your files never carried.

A controller attaches the close export, the budget file and last month's deck. Before a single page is drafted, the run reports that the deck's EBITDA line carries addbacks the covenant calculation does not, that the variance table compares against the original plan while the commentary references the spring reforecast, and that two pages of last month's deck were carried forward with the prior month's numbers still in them.