Weekly Executive Reporting

Overview

The founder is the filter, and the founder has no time to filter. Yet every Monday, someone spends 90 minutes stitching together a weekly brief from five different sources, each with its own definition of success. This workflow pulls your agreed metrics (ARR, churn, CAC, onboarding velocity, support backlog) from your actual source systems—not Slack—writes a first-draft narrative that contextualizes the numbers, and routes it to your CFO or CEO for approval before it lands in the exec Slack channel. The system works because it enforces three things: (1) one source of truth per metric, (2) a template that forces narrative, not just tables, and (3) a human approval gate that takes 10 minutes, not 90. Why this matters: inconsistent reporting erodes confidence in your data. A CEO who sees three different churn numbers in three different briefs stops trusting any of them. This workflow makes the metric definition explicit, the source auditable, and the narrative testable. You'll catch data errors before they reach leadership. You'll also free up 4 hours a month from manual assembly—time your ops team can spend on actual analysis instead of copy-paste.

Flow

Trigger: Every Monday at 6 AM (or your preferred cadence). The system checks that all source systems are available and metric definitions are current.

1. 1
   Trigger

   Weekly schedule

2. 2
   Integration

   Export agreed metrics

3. 3
   Action

   Draft narrative commentary

4. 4
   Approval

   Operator edits & verifies numbers

5. 5
   Notify

   Distribute to leadership

6. 6
   Action

   Archive brief

Setup instructions

1. List your 5–8 core metrics and their source systems (Stripe for ARR, your product DB for onboarding, support tool for backlog). 2. Define the calculation for each (e.g., 'ARR = sum of active subscriptions × 12'). 3. Build a Zapier or Make workflow that pulls each metric at the scheduled time. 4. Use an LLM prompt to generate a 2–3 paragraph narrative that explains week-over-week change, flags anomalies, and suggests next steps. 5. Route the draft brief to your CFO or CEO via email or Slack with a 'Approve' / 'Request Changes' button. 6. On approval, post to your exec Slack channel and archive the version in a shared drive. 7. Test with one metric first; add others once the workflow is stable.

Failure cases

• A source system is down or returns no data. The workflow stalls. Mitigation: build a 'data unavailable' alert that triggers a Slack message to ops 30 min before the brief is due, so a human can decide whether to delay or use last week's number.
• The LLM narrative invents a story that contradicts the numbers (e.g., 'strong growth' when churn is up). Mitigation: add a human review step where the CFO checks the narrative against the raw metrics before approval.
• Metric definitions drift. Sales calls ARR one way, finance another. Mitigation: store all definitions in a single doc (Notion, Airtable) that the workflow reads at runtime. Version it monthly.
• The CEO approves a brief with an error, it goes public, and the error spreads. Mitigation: require a second sign-off from finance before the brief is posted to Slack or sent to the board.
• The workflow runs but no one checks the approval queue. The brief sits in draft for three days. Mitigation: send a reminder Slack message to the approver 2 hours before the deadline.