A few years ago I watched a business leader commit to “building a 1-stop-shop mobile-first reporting dashboard” for every important metric in the business.
(this was an 11-figure business with hundreds of operational metrics and KPIs)
They commandeered the best reporting resources in the company for an entire year, forced the build of the MVP dashboard as a single mobile-optimized Tableau, then watched as precisely 0 executives used it for a number of different reasons.
Lots of our best reporting talent quit during this build - that’s how bad it was.
Executives get paid to push lofty goals and visions.
Great.
But a vision without context or nuance can quickly become a nightmare and a waste of time.
Let’s talk about my personal approach to business and financial reporting and how to avoid a reporting disaster…
There’s a point in every finance leader’s tenure where they start to see how much their manual finance processes are costing them in money, time, and credibility.
And for finance leaders, credibility is everything.
Whether you woke up today wanting a reporting & forecasting new tool or not, I encourage you to schedule a demo with Aleph and just see what’s possible. I think you’ll be impressed (I was).
Genuinely, there are very few opportunities for finance to improve reporting, analysis, forecasting, and consulting in 1 shot. This is one of those shots.
What’s an ideal reporting structure?
You know that feeling when you see something that just feels right?
That’s how I feel about the reporting vision I’m about to share with you.
It just makes sense.
Senior leaders like it.
People who build reporting respect it.
And it solves 95% of reporting needs.
Here it is:
The Forecasting Performance Reporting Vision
From the bottom to the top, here’s what you need to know:
Standardized reporting = 10 year reporting: this is the reporting that when you take a really big step back as the CFO or Head of Finance for a business, you think to yourself “this is what every company in my industry should be looking at”. I’m not talking about the P&L and balance sheet, but more about the standardized reporting layer that you build once for key financial and operational metrics in your business - you can just set-it-and-forget-it
Dashboards = Annual reporting: these are your reports that are leveraged by users or for specific use-cases to run the business. They likely combine a number of different metrics or provide drill-through capabilities. These are messy and complex on the back-end (but very clean to the end-user) and likely change every year or maybe quarter depending on the leader and or goals
Insights = Business trends: this is the most flexible based on what’s happening any given month. These kinds of reports can be simple emails, excel files, or fancy tools. But the point here is they shift all the time based on exactly how the executive wants to interact with the business and what trends are driving the conversation
What would be foolish here is hastily building your Standardized reporting layer. Or spending months trying to design a static Executive Insights report.
Each layer requires a different and unique approach. They have their own strategies that should be respected - if not, you’ll burn out an entire reporting team and frustrate executives.
Likely this single insight is what is causing frustration for a lot of business and finance leaders who are asking for “dashboards” or “reports” but are using incorrect language based on what’s actually needed.
Let’s talk about my 2026 approach (for those who care) and how you can use this insight to evaluate your own…
Focus on the 10-year Standardized Reporting
The cool thing about a framework like the one above is you can quickly put red/yellow/green on each color to assess what’s working v not.
And in most cases when I step into a new role I find that the upper levels of reporting (dashboards and insights) are only as strong as the foundation (standardized).
So I almost always focus on the standardized layer first.
What I find to be true more often is that the foundation of reporting that gets built over time is a haphazard conglomerate of people’s best intentions and biased opinions of what they want to see. This means that everything on top of it also feels chaotic and haphazard - because the foundation is off.
Nope. No more.
My goal as Head of Finance is to design: The best standardized reporting suite for any business in my industry that should sustain us for the next 10 years.
That should be your first reporting goal too.
Which means I’m in build mode right now. Back to basics and designing exactly what we should be looking at every month for the next 10 years.
But what about dashboards and insights?…
Insights = Raw Power of the Will
Like any great finance leader, I can’t just say “sorry, I’m rebuilding my 10-year reporting vision, come back next year for insights”
And the cool thing about Insights is they can take any form and are more analytical in nature (why it happened) than standardized reporting (what happened).
We’re running a classic barbell approach to reporting in 2026:
One team of mine is building the foundation, the 10-year reporting vision
One team of mine is pumping out insights every month for leadership
We’re not focused on user-based or use-case based dashboards at all.
Those will be a 2027 focus.
Why?
Because that would require my reporting resources to have split focus (which I can’t afford).
And it’s infinitely easier to build your dashboards once you’ve set your foundation of metric/KPI definitions and how you should be evaluating the business as a whole.
Dashboards from that point simply become an exercise in aggregation.
How does software fit this journey?
I’m so glad you asked.
My unwavering opinion is:
You either pay with tech budget
Or you pay with people budget
For those in a leadership position who are wondering which is best - I personally believe the right answer is somewhere in the middle.
Excel is tech. It’s just cheap and a blank canvas.
So if all your reporting and dashboards are in Excel, that’s a choice to say you’ll save money on tech and spend it on resources. Which actually might make sense in the beginning when nothing feels ‘standardized’.
But I’d argue that any company above 50 employees should be on an FP&A/Finance software tool. The sheer amount of reconciliation, consolidation, reporting updates, etc. can be cut into a fraction of the time spent.
I’ve seen both ends of the spectrum. 11-figure companies relying entirely on Excel (no joke) and startups in FP&A tools.
It’s a night and day difference.
The main question is: once you free up your resources to do value-added work, what will you do?
That’s what I created the Finance Performance Assessment for. So you can see what’s next for adding value to your business.
How we can help:
Looking for a FP&A software tool for your business? Try out Aleph and start sleeping better at night (literally).
Curious how your finance function stacks up? Take the Finance Performance Assessment to see where your opportunities are [for business and finance pros].
Build your own FP&A Operating System so you can drive more impact through a best-in-class FP&A process [for finance pros].
Looking to elevate your FP&A leadership skills? Steal our Finance Manager Playbook to help you drive a healthy, high-performing finance team culture [for finance pros].
Get step-by-step video instruction on designing your perfect FP&A Flywheel. It’s the exact process we use when transforming FP&A teams [for finance pros].
Brett Hampson, Founder of Forecasting Performance