Investor update template: the monthly update investors actually read

The file has 10 pages: these 7 slides plus a cover, an appendix and a how-to slide you delete before sending.

Many founders send the update as an email and attach the deck. Keep the order identical so investors can compare months.

Subject: [Company] update, [Month Year]: [the month in one line]

Summary: ARR $X (+Y% vs last month, +Z% vs last year). Net revenue retention N%. Runway M months.
Highlights: three lines, each with a number.
Lowlights: three lines, each with what you are doing about it.
Metrics against plan: the same table every month.
Burn and runway: net burn $X, cash $Y, burn multiple Z.
Product and team: shipped, next, hires and departures.
Asks: introductions, hiring, advice. Be specific.

Same day, same metrics, every month. Consistency is the signal. Investors notice when a metric disappears in a bad month.

Lowlights get the same space as highlights. Investors who hear bad news early, with your response, help more and worry less. A lowlights section with nothing in it reads as a warning.

Define your metrics. ARR, net revenue retention and burn are calculated differently from one company to the next. The appendix says how you calculate each one, so nobody compares the wrong numbers.

Make the asks forwardable. "Intros to heads of finance at mid-market healthcare companies" gets answers. "Let us know if you can help" does not.

Keep it short. Most updates are read on a phone in under five minutes. Seven slides is enough.

At Rollstack we send our investors the same metrics in the same order every month, whatever the month looked like.

• Changing the metric set when a number looks bad.
• Vanity metrics in place of revenue, retention and burn.
• Runway that ignores committed spend or seasonality.
• Asks so general that nobody acts on them.
• Updates that stop after a hard quarter, which is when investors need them most.

The structure stays the same every month; only the numbers and the commentary change. That makes the update a good candidate for automation.

1. Open this template in Rollstack and connect your billing system, accounting, bank data and HR system, directly or through your warehouse, BI tool or a spreadsheet.
2. Map the summary, growth, metrics, and burn slides to their sources once.
3. On the same day each month, refresh. Every figure links to its source with the time it was synced, so you can check before you send.
4. Write the highlights, lowlights and asks yourself. Rollstack can draft the commentary for you to edit, labeled as AI-drafted.
5. Export to PowerPoint or PDF, or paste the summary into your email.

Cribl reports zero data errors in its board reporting with Rollstack.

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