Every quarter, the same thing happens at startups across every stage.
The board meeting is in five days. The CEO needs a deck with real numbers. Someone pulls the Stripe CSV, someone else updates the spreadsheet, a third person starts building slides — and for two or three days, people who should be running the company are instead assembling a presentation.
There's a better way. This is how to set up Rex to generate that deck automatically — and what to include so your board gets something worth reading.
Why Board Deck Prep Costs More Than You Think
The direct cost is obvious: two to three days of three people's time, every quarter. But the indirect cost is worse.
When you're assembling a board deck manually, you're also:
- Discovering financial discrepancies you should have caught weeks ago
- Realising your numbers don't reconcile across tools
- Making judgment calls about which metrics to include because you haven't established a consistent framework
- Writing narrative under time pressure that doesn't reflect the actual story
The result is a deck that's technically correct but not particularly useful — to the board or to you. The best board decks don't get assembled under pressure. They get reviewed under pressure, because the assembly already happened.
What Rex Generates
Rex connects to your financial data sources and generates a complete board update from live data. Here's what each section looks like:
MRR Waterfall
The MRR waterfall breaks down your monthly recurring revenue movement by component:
Starting MRR: $182,000
+ New MRR: +$24,300 (new customers this month)
+ Expansion MRR: +$8,100 (existing customers upgrading)
- Contraction MRR: -$2,400 (existing customers downgrading)
- Churned MRR: -$6,200 (customers who cancelled)
= Ending MRR: $205,800 (+13.1% MoM)
This is the most important single chart in your financial deck. It shows not just whether revenue grew, but why — and whether the growth is driven by acquisition, expansion, or both.
Burn and Runway
Rex calculates both net burn (cash out minus revenue received) and gross burn (total cash out), with the current runway in months at both burn rates.
Gross Burn: $68,000/mo
Net Burn: $29,000/mo (after revenue)
Cash Balance: $1,240,000
Runway (net): 42.8 months
It also shows a trend line: is your net burn increasing, flat, or decreasing month-over-month? An increasing burn trend alongside flat MRR growth is a story your board will want to discuss.
Unit Economics Summary
| Metric | This Month | Last Month | Target | |--------|-----------|-----------|--------| | Blended CAC | $1,240 | $1,380 | $1,200 | | LTV (gross margin) | $4,960 | $4,780 | $5,000 | | LTV:CAC | 4.0x | 3.5x | >3:1 | | CAC Payback | 17.2 mo | 19.4 mo | <18 mo |
Rex pulls CAC from your acquisition cost data (ad spend, sales costs, marketing tools) and calculates LTV from your actual cohort retention data — not the simplified formula.
Variance Analysis
The variance section compares actual performance against your approved budget, flagging lines where you're ahead, behind, or significantly off:
Revenue: +4.2% vs budget (ahead)
Gross Margin: -1.1% vs budget (slightly behind — raw material costs)
Headcount: -8.3% vs budget (two open roles not filled)
Net Burn: +12.4% vs budget (over — explain in narrative)
Upload your budget dataset once; Rex runs the comparison against your actuals automatically every month.
The Weekly CFO Digest
Between board meetings, Rex sends a Monday morning digest — the brief a CFO would give you at the start of the week:
- What moved week-over-week (MRR, burn, cash position, key KPIs)
- What looks anomalous (a CAC spike, an unusual churn week, an expense line that jumped)
- Three focus actions for the week based on the numbers
Most founders find this digest more valuable than the board deck itself — it's the early warning system that means there are no surprises in the quarterly review.
How to Set This Up
Step 1: Connect your data sources
- Stripe (or Paddle/Chargebee) — Rex pulls subscription data and calculates all MRR components
- Bank feed — For real-time burn and cash position
- Ad platform data (optional) — For channel-level CAC breakdown
Step 2: Upload your budget Upload your annual budget as a CSV or Excel file. Rex stores it and uses it for every variance analysis going forward. One upload, persistent reference.
Step 3: Set your board update cadence Tell Rex when you want the monthly investor update generated — the first Monday of each month, the week before your board meeting, or on demand. It pulls the freshest data each time.
Step 4: Ask for what you need
- "Generate my board deck for May — pull from my latest dataset"
- "Run a variance analysis: actual results vs budget for last quarter"
- "Give me my Monday CFO digest — what moved and what looks weird"
The goal isn't to automate your board relationship. It's to automate the part that was consuming two days of preparation so you can spend those days on the relationship itself.