Monthly business review (MBR) template: an 11-slide outline that runs itself
Free to use and adapt for your own work.
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Nabil Jallouli, CEO of Rollstack (former BCG consultant) Updated Nov 11, 2026
A monthly business review works when leadership sees the same scorecard in the same order every month, reads the variances with an owner's explanation, and leaves with decisions. This template gives you 11 slides that do that, the metrics for each, and a way to stop rebuilding it by hand.
Who owns the MBR
Usually business operations, strategy and operations, or FP&A, with a chief of staff running the meeting. Each functional leader owns the commentary for their slides. The owner's job is to produce the deck; the meeting's job is to make decisions.
The 11 slides
| # | Slide | What goes on it | Typical source |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The month in one line | A headline sentence, such as "Revenue 4% above plan; SMB churn up for the second month", with 3 takeaways and up to 3 decisions needed | Written by the owner |
| 2 | Scorecard | 8 to 12 KPIs: actual, plan, prior month, prior year, status | BI dashboard or finance model |
| 3 | Revenue | 13-month trend vs plan, split by segment or product | Finance model, BI |
| 4 | Customers | New, lost and net retention, by segment | CRM through BI or warehouse |
| 5 | Leading indicators | Pipeline, trials, sign-ups, whatever predicts next quarter | CRM, product analytics |
| 6 | Operations | Delivery, fulfillment, support volume and response times | Ops systems through BI |
| 7 | Margin and costs | Gross margin, top cost lines vs budget | Finance model |
| 8 | People | Headcount vs plan, open roles, attrition | HRIS or a shared sheet |
| 9 | Focus topic | One rotating topic, chosen the month before | Varies |
| 10 | Risks and issues | Each with an owner and a date | Written by owners |
| 11 | Decisions and next month | Decisions taken, asks, priorities | Written in the meeting |
| A | Appendix | Metric definitions, data sources, department detail | Data team |
The file has 14 pages: these 11 slides plus a cover, an appendix and a how-to slide you delete before presenting.
Rules that keep an MBR useful
Same order, every month. Leaders should know where to look. Changing the layout every month makes people re-learn the deck instead of reading it.
One scorecard slide. If a metric is not on the scorecard, it should not be in the main deck. Put the rest in the appendix.
Commentary from owners, not the deck builder. "Revenue was down 3%" restates the chart. "Down 3% because two enterprise renewals slipped to November; both signed" is commentary.
Definitions in the appendix. When a metric's definition changes, say so on the slide. Otherwise the trend line lies.
A data cutoff. Freeze the numbers at a fixed time, such as close of business on the third business day, so everyone argues about the same figures.
Mistakes we see most often
- Screenshots of dashboards that nobody can read at presentation size.
- 40 slides for a 60-minute meeting.
- A scorecard with 30 metrics and no status column.
- Comparing a partial month to a full month.
- The deck builder spending two days on copy-paste and two hours on analysis.
Make it refresh itself
The structure above barely changes from month to month. Only the numbers do. That is exactly the kind of deck that should not be rebuilt by hand.
In Rollstack:
- Open this template, or your own, and connect the sources: your BI dashboards, the finance model in Excel, the targets in Google Sheets.
- Map each chart and figure on slides 2 to 8 to its source. Rollstack can also draft them from a plain-language brief.
- Schedule the refresh for your data cutoff, for example 8am on the third business day.
- Owners get the refreshed deck and write their commentary. Rollstack can draft the variance takeaways, labeled for review.
- If each region or business unit runs its own MBR, a Burst produces one version per unit from the same template.
What our customers say
“With Rollstack, we are able to build one deck to review key company metrics with leadership that can be quickly refreshed each week directly from our analytics tool without having to log in, take screenshots, and pull each slide by hand. All we need to do is hit refresh and give the slides a final review before they go to leadership, saving us a lot of time and allowing our analytics team to spend more time on true analysis.”
Lauren ZionVP of Business Operations & Analytics, Socure“We tried building our own solution to handle our weekly reporting, but if a visualization changed by one pixel, the whole thing broke. Rollstack replaced that fragility with enterprise-grade reliability, allowing us to generate 300+ unique slides every week.”
Björn BolderdijkData Team Lead, Coolblue“We mapped our Tableau data to slides once with Rollstack. Now every executive report updates itself. It’s the part of our data stack we didn’t know was missing.”
Tyler DanzeyDirector, Finance Analytics, TripadvisorCommon questions
How long should a monthly business review be?
Twelve main slides is a good ceiling for a 60-minute meeting. Everything else belongs in the appendix.
Who should attend the MBR?
The leadership team and the owners of each metric. The deck should be sent 24 hours before, so the meeting discusses decisions rather than reading slides.
Is an MBR the same as a monthly management report?
They overlap. A management report is usually a finance document read on its own; an MBR deck is built for a meeting. Many teams produce both from the same numbers.
Get the template
Free to use and adapt for your own work.
Native PowerPoint charts and tables, sample data from a fictional company, and speaker notes on every slide. Using Google Slides? Upload the file to Drive and open it with Google Slides; charts arrive as pictures, everything else stays editable, so it's best in PowerPoint.
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About Rollstack.
Rollstack is the AI presentation platform for business reporting. It connects to data warehouses such as Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery and Redshift, BI tools such as Tableau, Power BI and Looker, and spreadsheets such as Excel and Google Sheets. It also connects to CRMs such as Salesforce and HubSpot, PDFs and documents, and any other source through its API. It builds decks in your own PowerPoint or Google Slides template, links every number to its source, refreshes on a schedule, and creates one version per region, sales channel, team, product line or client. Teams build and edit decks in Rollstack, export them to PowerPoint, Google Slides or PDF, and each stakeholder gets their version in a personalized email. Rollstack is LLM-agnostic, access follows the permissions in your BI tools and warehouse, and it is SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA and GDPR compliant. Customers include SoFi, Tripadvisor, CarGurus and Octopus Energy.
Monthly business review (MBR) template: an 11-slide outline that runs itself · 14 pages
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