A board pack is not a bigger weekly report. The audience is different, the time horizon is different, and the questions are different — a board wants to know whether the business is working, not whether last Tuesday's ACoS was acceptable.

Built once, it should take under an hour a month.

**Time: two hours to build. Under an hour monthly after that.**

[Watch the walkthrough](https://kb.trackiq.com/kb-assets/kbvideo-board-pack-explainer-7cc3d3fb.mp4)

*Prefer to watch? Eighty seconds on leading with total sales, and the two paragraphs nobody else can write.*

## **Step 1 — Decide what the board is deciding**

Every slide should serve one of three decisions. If it serves none, cut it:

**Should we put more money in?** — growth, acquisition, category momentum.

**Is anything going wrong?** — erosion, concentration risk, availability.

**Are we spending well?** — efficiency, but as context rather than the headline.

A board pack that opens with ACoS has misjudged the room. ACoS is an operating metric; it belongs in the appendix.

## **Step 2 — Lead with the whole business, not the advertised part**

**Analytics → Category Insights.**

![Total Sales beside Ad Sales, per category](/kb-assets/shot-b24-cats-view-cfe6c9.png)

This is the right opening because it is the only screen with **Total Sales beside Ad Sales**, which lets you show **TACoS** — how much of the business is bought.

Per category, month over month and against the same month last year:

**Total sales**, then **TACoS**, then **total units**. Three numbers, one table.

The reading that earns its slot is the divergence: **ad sales rising while total sales stays flat** means advertising is replacing organic rather than adding to it. That is a strategic finding, and it is invisible on every advertising screen. See [**Benchmark Yourself Against Your Own Category**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/benchmark-against-your-category).

## **Step 3 — Show acquisition, not just sales**

**AMC Cloud → NTB Customers.**

![New customers by format, rate and volume](/kb-assets/shot-b27-cust-top-7fa12d.png)

**NTB Users** is the closest thing to a growth metric the account produces, and most board packs never include it.

Show the **count** month over month, not just the share — a percentage can improve while the absolute number of new customers falls, which is the worst outcome wearing the best-looking number.

If you want one derived figure, blended acquisition cost — total ad spend divided by NTB users — is rough but far more board-relevant than ACoS. Say that it is rough.

## **Step 4 — Name the risks**

Boards remember the pack that told them about a problem before it arrived. Two are worth a standing slide:

**Concentration.** If a small number of ASINs bring most of your new customers, say so and show the number. That is a real dependency, and it belongs in a risk register rather than in an ads report. See [**NTB ASINs Analysis: Finding Your Gateway Products**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/ntb-asins-analysis).

**Availability.** Days of cover on the products that matter, and any stock-out that happened during the month with what it cost in rank. See [**Catch a Stockout Before It Costs You Rank**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/catch-a-stockout-early).

## **Step 5 — Build it once, in a template**

**Business Reports → AI Report Generator**, then save the result.

![Describe the report properly, then set the comparison range](/kb-assets/shot-b28-aigen-view-3b61a4.png)

Start from **Executive Review**, choose **Slides**, and describe it with the audience and the decision named:

> *Monthly board pack. Total sales and TACoS by category against last month and the same month last year, new-to-brand customers by month, the ASINs driving acquisition, and any stock cover below four weeks. The decision is next quarter's investment.*

**Turn on the comparison range.** For a board pack this is not optional — a monthly number with nothing beside it is not information.

Then **⋮ → Save as Template**, and next month starts from a known-good structure. See [**Business Report Templates and the AI Report Generator**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/report-templates-and-ai-generator).

## **Step 6 — Write the two paragraphs nobody else can**

The pack's numbers will be right and its interpretation will be generic. That is the half you supply:

**What changed, and why.** One paragraph. Not what the numbers did — what caused them.

**What we are doing about it.** One paragraph. The decisions already taken, so the meeting starts from action rather than from explanation.

Aria can draft the first — *"what changed most vs last month and what caused it?"* — but read it before it goes in. See [**Checking Aria's Work When an Answer Looks Wrong**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/checking-arias-work).

## **A structure that holds up**

| Slide | Content |
|---|---|
| 1 | Headline: total sales, growth, one sentence |
| 2 | Category performance — total sales and TACoS |
| 3 | Acquisition — NTB users by month |
| 4 | Risks — concentration and availability |
| 5 | What we are doing about it |
| Appendix | Efficiency: ACoS, spend by format, campaign detail |

**Five slides and an appendix.** The appendix is where you put everything you would be asked about but should not lead with.

## **What not to do**

**Do not lead with ACoS.** It answers a question the board did not ask.

**Do not change the structure monthly.** A board reading the same shape each month spots change instantly. A board reading a new layout spends the meeting orienting.

**Do not present a number without a comparison.**

**Do not hide a bad month.** The pack that surfaces a problem early buys you the credibility to be believed about the next one.

**Do not send it unread.** A generated pack read first by its audience is how a wrong number becomes a board decision.

## **A note on delivery**

There is no email scheduling for reports today, so producing from the template and sending it yourself is the current path. It takes minutes once the template exists.

## **Related**

- [**Business Report Templates and the AI Report Generator**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/report-templates-and-ai-generator) — step 5.
- [**Benchmark Yourself Against Your Own Category**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/benchmark-against-your-category) — step 2.
- [**NTB Customers: New vs Repeat, Counted as People**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/ntb-customers) — step 3.
- [**Build a Weekly Executive Summary You Never Have to Write**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/build-a-weekly-exec-summary) — the weekly sibling.