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If you spend enough time on social media you’ll start believing finance should skip reporting entirely.
IMO, that couldn’t be farther from the truth when it comes to real businesses being run by real people.
I’ve lived in environments where reporting was a big missing (post-reorg, poor prior finance leadership, etc.). And nothing is more disorienting as a Head of Finance than not having the reporting needed at your fingertips.
And while everyone is wasting time talking about AI, I’m doubling-down on good old-fashioned reporting strategy.
Here’s the specific strategy I’m currently running for 2026 that you can steal…
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Step 1: Reporting Vision
Those of you who have followed for a while know I’m in a new role as of the last 6 months.
And while I try not to be ‘that guy’ who comes in and rebuilds everything with my preference, I obviously have some specific things I want to see.
But instead of jumping straight into rebuilding specific reports (unless absolutely needed) I spent the last 6 months developing my vision for where we’ll go with our reporting next. Here’s some insights into that:
Vision: Bridge the gap between financial performance and operational performance for the finance executive group while also supporting the business with their reporting needs. We will produce executive level insights quickly and clearly.
This vision is nice and simple… fast, clear, insightful, using financial and operational data. With a very clear person we are solving reporting for.
I strongly encourage you to do the same (set a vision). I know it sounds silly, but with something like reporting it can be very hard to manage scope creep once things start going off the rails.
Every ounce of effort in setting a clear vision often saves 5 ounces of wasted effort.
Step 2: Setting the Focus Areas
We often take for granted the fact that your reporting quality can drive your meeting quality.
For example, you have an expense meeting that never goes quite right?
Your cause might be a sub-par report you’ve been sending for years.
So I advocate for working backwards from your focus areas (from an actual felt need in the business) and using that to form where you’ll spend your energy building reporting.
Personally, I have a few executive meetings and key moments throughout the month that aren’t where I want them - so you can clearly see in my vision that my focus is on executive reporting. A different version of me would instead be focusing on drill-through reporting, but that’s not where we are right now.
The insight here is to think critically about where your reporting is falling short and translating that into a reporting focus area.
Step 3: Non-negotiables
How something gets done is often as important as what is getting done.
And for me, this is critically important. I call these my non-negotiables…
Here’s a few of those non-negotiables that you can steal for your 2026 reporting strategy:
I refuse to build a report that is close to another report in both substance and style.
I obsess over the front-end of the report - designing the exact report that is best-practice and should be used for a decade
But the back-end of the report will continue to change. So instead of obsessing over the automations and data structures, it’s more important we nail the front-end usability… or it won’t get used
Directional wins over perfection for anything not directly tied to financials - whether the driver is up 5.6% or 4.8% almost doesn’t matter to me
I don’t need a report if I can just get spoon-fed the insight. You know that a $1M sales contract will win the quarter for you? Then an automated email alert would be better than a PowerBI report.
You should always have a process for sunsetting, consolidating, and updating reports. This should be automatic, not a massive effort every time.
One that is worth calling out separate is the fact that I’ll always put the most important stuff on my team’s reporting priority list without negotiation and regardless of capacity.
If this means we have to kill 5 other reports to open up space for the team to create the 1 new one that I deem critical, then that’s what we need to do.
Don’t be afraid to design your perfect reporting suite before you even think about your team’s capacity. I often find it’s easier to make a funding request if it’s framed as “I need 1 more person to be able to build x, y, and z this year”…
Step 4: Exactly What I’m Doing
If you’ve made it this far in the newsletter, you deserve a reward.
Here’s my reporting suite for 2026:
Topline Flash Report (revenue) as soon as possible (WD 1)
Financial Flash Report (profit) as soon as possible (WD 6ish)
Monthly Insights Report that connects financial results to the specific drivers (revenue, sales volume, average rev per sale, leads, conversions, etc for every metric)
Daily and Weekly topline reporting - showing 7-day moving averages compared to plan
Profitability Cohort Reporting (this one is unique to insurance) to evaluate and monitory our profit trends by each cohort of customer
Large Event Triggers/Reports - in a massive company, we plan for the averages but the outliers are often what drives results, so having reports set up to monitor the large events is helpful
Initiative Measurement - every time the business agrees to something it’s going on my list. We’ll capture the commitment and then monitor it monthly for everyone to see.
2026 Plan Scorecard - everything that made it into the plan is getting pulled out separately to measure and monitor on a monthly basis.
Good luck in 2026!
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Brett Hampson, Founder of Forecasting Performance
