Key Reports

Key Reports is a presentation sheet, not a calculation sheet. It displays information that is calculated elsewhere in the model, laid out as charts and short tables you can drop straight into a deck or a monthly update. Nothing on it feeds anything else. It exists so you don't have to build the same six charts every time someone asks how the business is doing.

The sheet ships in both the Standard Financial Model and the Runway Tool. The charts cover the things a founder gets asked about most: burn, runway, cash balance over time, revenues and growth, expenses by category, and sources and uses of cash. Think of it as a starting point for how to summarize your business rather than the final word on it.

How it works

Every figure on the sheet is pulled from Statements or Forecast. The charts reference those rows directly, so when you change an assumption on Get Started, paste in a month of actuals, or add a hire on Hiring Plan, the charts update on their own. There is no refresh step and no data to copy across.

Because it reads from the merged actuals-plus-forecast block, the charts show history and projection on one axis once you've linked in actual financials. That's usually the chart a board wants: where we've been, where we think we're going, on the same line.

Inputs

None. Every cell on the sheet is a formula or a chart.

Common modifications

This is the sheet I most expect you to edit, because how you summarize your business is a judgment call, and the prebuilt version is my judgment, not yours.

The most common change is adding charts. If there's a metric you report every month, a customer count, MRR, gross margin by product, pipeline coverage, it's already calculated somewhere on Forecast, Revenues or Key Metrics. Build the chart here so it's pre-formatted and lives next to the others. Copying an existing chart and repointing its series is faster than starting from a blank chart, and it keeps the formatting consistent.

The second is changing the time period. The charts default to the monthly timeline of the model. For a deck you may want quarters or fiscal years instead, and the annual roll-ups on Summary are the easiest source for that. Hide the lines you don't need rather than deleting them, so they're there when the question comes up.

If you're formatting for print or a slide, resize the charts to the aspect ratio of your template before exporting. Getting the size right in the spreadsheet beats resizing a pasted image.

Key Reports can be hidden or deleted with no impact on the rest of the model.