Build your board deck from live data

Most board decks are assembled the same way: export from Stripe, export from the accounting tool, paste into a spreadsheet, fix the formulas that broke, screenshot charts into slides, then discover two days before the meeting that the ARR on slide 3 disagrees with the cohort chart on slide 9. The deck takes a week of a founder’s or finance lead’s time, and the board still spends the first twenty minutes asking which number is right.

Sequoia’s guidance on board decks argues for the opposite approach: don’t overthink it, reuse the materials you already use to run the company, and send them ahead so the meeting is spent on discussion rather than presentation.¹Source 1 · Sequoia CapitalPreparing a Board Deckarticles.sequoiacap.com A live-data deck takes that advice literally. The slides are views on the same certified metrics your team looks at every week in Kimo Business Intelligence, so preparing the deck becomes reviewing and writing, not rebuilding.

You need read access to three kinds of system and one decision. The systems are billing (Stripe, Paddle or your own subscriptions table), accounting (QuickBooks or Xero) and CRM (HubSpot or Salesforce). Product usage from your application database is optional but makes the product slide much stronger. The decision is who owns each definition. If nobody owns “ARR”, the generator will happily produce a beautiful slide with an argued-over number.

1. 1
   Step 1:

   Connect billing

   In Connectors, add Stripe with a restricted, read-only key. Kimo syncs customers, subscriptions, invoices and credit notes; the first full sync of a few years of history usually completes within the hour.

2. 2
   Step 2:

   Connect accounting

   Add QuickBooks or Xero through OAuth. Kimo reads the chart of accounts, journal lines and bank balances so revenue, cost of revenue, operating expense and cash come from the ledger, not from a spreadsheet.

3. 3
   Step 3:

   Connect the CRM

   Add HubSpot or Salesforce. Map your pipeline stages once: which are “qualified”, which are closed-won and closed-lost.

4. 4
   Step 4:

   Connect product usage (optional)

   Point Kimo at a read replica of your application database (Postgres setup). If the database must not leave your network, install Kimo Bridge next to it: queries run through an outbound-only, mutually authenticated tunnel, and in Bridge mode nothing is stored on Kimo’s side beyond optional short-lived result caches you can disable. Choose Cloud mode for that source only if you want history synced into Kimo’s cloud.

Before any slide exists, certify the measures the deck will use. The SaaS metrics template gives you a starting set: MRR, ARR, the MRR bridge, net and gross revenue retention, gross margin, CAC payback, burn multiple, runway and pipeline coverage. Each is explained, with formulas and reference SQL, in SaaS metrics, defined once.

Definitions should be explicit about inclusions and exclusions. Andreessen Horowitz warns that ARR should exclude one-time and professional services fees, and that bookings and revenue are not interchangeable.²Source 2 · Andreessen Horowitz, 201516 Startup Metricsa16z.com Stripe’s own MRR excludes taxes, free plans and metered products and normalizes annual plans to a monthly value.³Source 3 · Stripe DocumentationBilling analytics: metric definitionsdocs.stripe.com Your YAML should say the same things in a form a machine can enforce.

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041model: board_metrics
owner: finance
measures:
  arr:
    type: derived
    sql: 12 * {revenue.mrr}
    format: currency
    description: >
      Month-end recurring subscriptions x 12. Excludes trials, taxes,
      one-time, services and metered usage. Source of truth: Stripe,
      reconciled to ledger subscription revenue each month.
    certified: true
  net_new_arr:
    type: derived
    sql: 12 * ({revenue.new_mrr} + {revenue.expansion_mrr} - {revenue.contraction_mrr} - {revenue.churned_mrr})
    format: currency
    certified: true
  gross_margin:
    type: ratio
    numerator: "{ledger.revenue} - {ledger.cost_of_revenue}"
    denominator: "{ledger.revenue}"
    format: percent
    certified: true
  net_burn:
    type: sum
    sql: -amount
    filters: [category in ('operating', 'capex')]
    model: cash_movements
    format: currency
    certified: true
  burn_multiple:
    type: ratio
    numerator: "{net_burn}"
    denominator: "{net_new_arr}"
    format: multiple
    certified: true
  runway_months:
    type: derived
    sql: "{cash.balance} / avg_last_3_months({net_burn})"
    format: number
    certified: true

Certified measures appear with a badge everywhere in Kimo, including in Ask Kimo answers, and any edit opens a review with a diff. That review history is what lets you answer “did the definition change?” in one click during diligence. For the syntax, see measures and dimensions.

Open Board decks and choose the board deck template. Pick the reporting period (usually the quarter just closed), the comparison period (prior quarter and same quarter last year) and the plan to compare against. Kimo builds each slide from certified measures and drafts a short commentary for each one, flagging anything that moved more than your chosen threshold.

The default structure follows the shape Sequoia recommends for early board meetings: a big-picture CEO update with highlights and lowlights, a calibration section with a small set of accurate metrics, company-building topics such as the org chart and roadmap, a working session on one or two strategic questions, and a closed session.¹Source 1 · Sequoia CapitalPreparing a Board Deckarticles.sequoiacap.com

A burn multiple trend like the one above is a good example of a slide that benefits from live data. David Sacks defines the metric as net burn divided by net new ARR and argues it should approach zero over time.⁴Source 4 · David Sacks (Craft Ventures), 2020The Burn Multiplesacks.substack.com Computed by hand, it is easy to mix a cash-based burn with a P&L-based one in different quarters; computed from a certified measure, the method is identical every time.

Example: a summary slide that works

The generated summary slide gives you the numbers; the words are yours. A strong pattern is three sentences: what happened, why, and what you need. For a fictional company: “ARR grew to $6.1M, 4% behind plan, because two enterprise deals slipped into October; expansion from existing customers covered most of the gap. Net burn was on plan and runway is 22 months. We would like the board’s view on hiring a second enterprise account executive this quarter.”

Each figure in that paragraph is a live reference to a certified measure, so if a late credit note changes ARR before you publish, the sentence updates and the reviewer sees the change highlighted.

Generation is fast; review is where the quality comes from. Kimo shows a reconciliation panel next to the deck: ARR against ledger subscription revenue, ending cash against the bank balance, closed-won bookings against new MRR. Any gap above your tolerance turns amber and must be explained or resolved before the deck can be published.

When the deck is approved, Kimo publishes it as a frozen snapshot: the numbers, charts and commentary are stored with the period, the measure versions and the time of publication. Live data keeps moving (late invoices, credit notes, reclassified expenses), but the deck the board read stays exactly as they read it. If a number later changes materially, you publish an erratum that shows the old value, the new value and the reason.

1. 1
   Step 1:

   Send early

   Share a view-only link or PDF one to two days before the meeting, as Sequoia suggests,¹Source 1 · Sequoia CapitalPreparing a Board Deckarticles.sequoiacap.com so directors arrive with questions rather than reading in the room.

2. 2
   Step 2:

   Control access

   Links are scoped to named board members and observers, expire by default and are logged. Revoke access for departing directors in one place.

3. 3
   Step 3:

   Capture decisions

   After the meeting, add decisions and follow-ups to the snapshot. Next quarter’s deck opens with “last time we said…”.

4. 4
   Step 4:

   File it

   Each published deck lands in the data room folder for board materials automatically. See Prepare your data room.

Yes, and it should. The investor update template uses the same certified measures in a shorter format: headline metrics, highlights, lowlights and asks. Because it reads from the same definitions, the ARR in your October update and in your Q4 board deck cannot disagree. Information rights in venture financings commonly include quarterly financial statements within 45 days of quarter end and an annual budget before the fiscal year starts,⁵Source 5 · Morrison & Foerster (MoFo ScaleUp)Ask a MoFo: Common Provisions in Venture Capital Term Sheets — Information and Observer Rightsscaleup.mofo.com so a monthly update built on the same data makes those obligations a by-product rather than a project. More on this in The monthly investor update, rebuilt on live data.

Consistency comes from treating definitions like code. The SEC’s guidance for public-company KPIs is a useful bar even for private companies: define each metric and how it is calculated, disclose changes in method with the reasons and effects, and consider recasting prior periods.⁶Source 6 · U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Federal Register, 2020Commission Guidance on Management’s Discussion and Analysis (Release 33-10751)govinfo.gov In practice, that means three habits.

1. 1Version definitions. Every change to a certified measure goes through review and gets a changelog entry. Kimo stores the version used by each published deck.
2. 2Recast, don’t splice. When a definition changes, regenerate prior quarters with the new rule and show both on the slide for one quarter. Never put an old-method Q2 next to a new-method Q3 on the same chart.
3. 3Keep the slide order stable. Directors build a mental model of your deck. Add slides at the end of a section; retire slides only after telling the board why.

For the full framework behind this routine (what boards look at by stage, deck narrative and data discipline), read The Board Pack Playbook. For a customer example, see our customer stories.