Remember when we would carry binders to business reviews?
I used to spend days finely tuning what pages were included, what order they were in, and memorizing what was where.
For those who didn't live this reality - it was like preparing for an open-book pop quiz on every business metric for the last 5 years and the next 3 years.
Every financial statement, forecast submission, retention curve, supplemental metrics, operational reports… everything.
While printing out all that paper and arranging the binder was arguably a terrible waste in hindsight, I do think some of the same principles carry forward to how we design reporting in FP&A in 2026.
Let’s explore what’s changed and what’s stayed the same within the Modern Reporting Ecosystem and how some of the best FP&A leaders are thinking intentionally about reporting design to deliver more value for their business…
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Speed-to-MVP reporting
I remember when I first learned about agile methodology and the power of automated reporting.
I had just taken over an FP&A team that had a dotted line to a dedicated team of Tableau report builders. They operated in an agile development cadence.
The promise of this dedicated reporting team was: If you dream it, we can build it. We’ll build an MVP quickly to get feedback then iterate over time until it’s complete.
The literal dream as an FP&A leader.
But there was a problem…
Business leaders would ask for a new BI report for some nuanced reason I didn’t fully comprehend (which is fine, but I just couldn’t steer the work as well), the MVP would get built, then the report would get stuck in feedback iterations for a year. They wanted every cut of data possible added to that report.
My very valuable Tableau developers would get locked down tinkering with the report to please the business leaders - who clearly didn’t know what they wanted.
Fast-forward to today…
I (as a VP of FP&A) can now build an MVP report/dashboard as fast as I can dream it.
I simply spin up a Claude Code session, tell Claude what I want to build, then Claude brings me back an MVP in minutes.
Connected to the data warehouse
SQL is documented and checked against an independent source
Output is instantly sharable with the business partners for rapid iteration
Then, when that report has sufficiently survived iterations, a few manual refreshes, and seems to have risen to the level of a durable ongoing report, we promote it to the BI environment.
The speed to MVP reporting is mind blowing nowadays.
As an FP&A leader, I can develop robust reporting and create answers to business questions almost faster than I was able to flip through my binder.
But just because you can build it doesn’t mean you should automate it…
The shadow side of automated reporting
Let’s go back to my days leading the FP&A team with the Tableau developers…
I walked into a problem in that role.
For years, there was a culture of the business requesting what they “needed to run the business” and FP&A/developers simply building.
Years of automated Tableau reporting had piled up, refreshing daily, with no clear hierarchy for what was “official” versus not - or what tied to our monthly executive level reporting or not.
Metric definitions were squishy and there was no legit governance over what got built or why. Our reporting environment got slower over time and we didn’t have success sunsetting reports because everything was critical to the business (or so they said).
To be fair, we tried. We had a data governance team. We had prioritization meetings. We did everything right on paper. But FP&A had bigger fish to fry and who were we to tell the business they didn’t really need that report?
The solution is clear in hindsight after years of fighting it: Develop dedicated Layers of Reporting that can be managed by different users for different use cases.
Layer 1: Your protected KPI layer that gives executives the exact context they need to run the business. All enhancements/changes to these reports have to run through FP&A.
Layer 2: Your forecast aligned driver layer that connects those KPIs to the industry-standard drivers you’d also find in your forecast model for those KPIs. FP&A should control this layer too but with heavy business involvement - this should move in line with your forecast model.
Layer 3+: Your context layer(s) that gives business leaders everything they need to run the business. Metrics don’t need to tie exactly if there’s a reason and the business can control what they need to see with these reports. Used and developed by FP&A but controlled by the business.
A reporting cadence is still required
There’s a final pitfall I need to mention because it’s becoming a larger problem in FP&A teams I see.
Now that all the reporting is available all the time via BI, there is a growing trend of business/finance leaders throwing their monthly financial review cadence in the trash.
I think this is a huge mistake.
We’re talking about finance/business leaders assuming no cadence is needed because everyone should free-for-all the reporting and come up with their own storyline.
To ground us, here’s the simple reporting cadence I teach in The FP&A OS:
Results Flash — what happened. Automated. No why. No recommendation. As early as possible.
Results Summary — the first point of view. Still short. Written by FP&A with the key ‘what you need to know’ and ‘what we are investigating’.
Early Meeting — the storyline gets pressure-tested with the people who own the drivers. FP&A leads, highlighting out of pattern results and early findings with the business leaders.
Forecast Review — any analysis done to understand the out of pattern result is used to influence the forecast. The forecast review is the business chance to see those changes.
ELT / Board Reporting — this is the reporting that needs to happen. Should simply be an output of the last 4 meetings highlights.
There’s a certain comfort and predictability to a monthly cadence. It allows FP&A to investigate, partner with the business, and surface the right storylines.
Maybe I’m old fashioned but I still think the monthly reporting cadence is critical to focusing the organization on what matters.
- This newsletter was handwritten without AI (for those who care)
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Brett Hampson, Founder of Forecasting Performance