Run a monthly business review

Bring financial, delivery and service results together at one cutoff, then agree the next actions.

Before you start

Agree the review period, cutoff, currency, accounting basis and list of work included. Name a preparer and reviewer. Keep the original source records and a dated version of the report so a later correction does not silently rewrite the earlier decision.

Reconcile the results

1. Gather the relevant Finance records, Board projects and tasks, and Desk requests. Use exact record identifiers to connect them. A supporting Board task is not automatically proof that a Desk requester’s problem was resolved.

2. Check duplicate and missing records before calculating. Add receipt allocations by invoice and payments by bill before combining summaries. Otherwise, one invoice can be repeated across several payment rows and counted more than once. Treat a blank as missing information, not zero.

3. Reconcile revenue and costs separately from customer receipts and supplier payments. Check receivables, payables, cash movements and closing balances against their source records. Read the actual period and scope on Finance’s General ledger, Profit & loss, Budget variance and Cash forecast reports before using their figures.

4. Compare budget actuals and still-open commitments with the governing budget version and line. A request and its resulting order can represent the same obligation. Account for documented conversion or cancellation instead of counting the original commitment again alongside its actual cost. Review line-level limits, not just the total remaining budget.

5. Check delivered outcomes against their acceptance evidence. Keep the same planned population when calculating task, project and service rates. Separate on-time acceptance, late acceptance and incomplete or unknown outcomes. A Done or Resolved status is a starting point for review, not a substitute for the actual result.

Turn the findings into decisions

6. Open the relevant goal and key results in Goals. Match each checkpoint’s population, unit, target and period before updating it. Keep Progress, Status and Confidence separate, and do not overwrite a later valid checkpoint or assume a child’s progress completes its parent.

7. Write a short management summary: what happened, what the figures mean, the important exceptions and the decisions needed. Explain profit versus cash rather than presenting either as the other. If preparing a BI view, verify its source, filters and displayed totals before relying on it; a saved blank dashboard is not the report.

8. Agree an owner, action, due date and evidence of completion for each decision. Before chasing a customer or arranging payment, check events since the cutoff so you do not act on a balance already settled.

9. At the next review, check those exact actions and publish a clearly identified correction if the source changed. Set the next month’s population and targets deliberately rather than copying the previous percentages.

Expected result

The review explains both the period’s results and the specific work needed next.

Remember: Later acceptance does not turn a late outcome into an on-time one. Shared project references support traceability; they do not prove that one business result caused another.

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