Somebody spends a morning every week assembling the same numbers into the same deck, and by the time it lands it is already a week old. That job should not exist.

The goal is not a report that writes itself — it is a **structure** that stays the same, so producing it takes minutes and reading it takes seconds.

**Time: an hour to set up. Ten minutes a week after that.**

[Watch the walkthrough](https://kb.trackiq.com/kb-assets/kbvideo-exec-summary-explainer-8d53010d.mp4)

*Prefer to watch? Eighty-one seconds on describing a report, and why boring structure is the goal.*

## **Step 1 — Decide who it is for, before anything else**

An executive summary that tries to serve everybody serves nobody. Pick one audience and write down the decision they make with it:

| Audience | The decision | What belongs in it |
|---|---|---|
| **Founder / GM** | where to put money next | total sales, TACoS, category movement |
| **Ads manager** | what to change this week | ACoS by group, wasted spend, what moved |
| **Board** | is this business working | trend, margin, acquisition |

If you cannot name the decision, you are producing a status update, and nobody reads those twice.

## **Step 2 — Generate the first one**

**Business Reports → AI Report Generator.**

![Quick-start shapes, a description box, and the comparison toggle](/kb-assets/shot-b28-aigen-view-3b61a4.png)

Start from **Executive Review** or **Weekly Ops**, then describe it properly. The instruction on the screen is the whole skill:

> *Mention the audience, the metrics, and the decision this should support.*

A weak description — *"weekly performance"* — produces a generic deck. A useful one names all three:

> *Weekly review for the founder. Total sales and ad sales by category, TACoS per category, the three campaigns whose spend moved most, and anything below three weeks of stock cover. The decision is where next month's budget goes.*

**Choose Slides for people, Dashboard for screens.** Slides are for sending; dashboards are for coming back to.

**Turn on the comparison range.** A number without a comparison is not information. This is the single most common omission.

## **Step 3 — Fix it once, properly**

The first generated report will be roughly right and specifically wrong. Edit it until it is the report you actually want — the right slides, the right order, nothing you would skip past.

Then spend two minutes on the thing that decides whether anybody reads it: **the order**. Put the number that drives the decision on the first slide. Detail goes at the back, where it can be ignored without cost.

## **Step 4 — Save it as a template**

![Templates, with slides, widgets and linked reports](/kb-assets/shot-b27-tpl-view-3b61a4.png)

The **⋮** menu on the report offers **Save as Template**. This is the step that converts a one-off into a routine.

A template stores the **structure**, not the data. Next week you produce the same layout against a new range, and the reader gets the same shape they learned last week — which is most of what makes a recurring report readable. People stop reading the report and start reading the *change*.

**Watch the Linked Reports column** over time. A template with several linked reports is doing real work; one sitting at zero was a layout nobody chose to reuse.

## **Step 5 — Add the interpretation, not just the numbers**

The numbers are the easy half. What makes a summary worth its slot is the sentence that says what changed and why.

Two ways to get it:

**An Insight Report alongside it.** Insight Reports ask the AI to find what is interesting in the data sources you tick, rather than presenting metrics you chose. They also keep **Revisions**, so you can see how the story changed week to week. See [**How to Create an AI-Powered Insight Report**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/how-to-create-an-ai-powered-insight-report).

**Aria, for the one-line why.** Ask *"what changed most vs last week and what caused it?"* and paste the answer under the headline number. See [**Asking Aria a Good Question**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/asking-aria-a-good-question).

## **Step 6 — Make the weekly job small**

Once the template exists, the routine is:

1. Produce the report from the template against last week's range.
2. Read it before anybody else does.
3. Add or correct the one-line interpretation.
4. Send it.

Step 2 is not optional. A generated report read by its recipients before its author is how a wrong number becomes a decision.

## **What good looks like**

**The same slides, every week, in the same order.** Boring is the goal. A reader who knows where to look reads it in ninety seconds and asks a better question than they used to.

**The interpretation is the only part you write.** If you are still assembling numbers by hand, the template is not finished.

## **What not to do**

**Do not redesign it monthly.** Consistency is the product. Change the structure only when the decision it supports changes.

**Do not include everything you can measure.** A slide nobody acts on is a slide that teaches people to skim.

**Do not skip the comparison range.** Twice as important as any individual metric.

**Do not send a generated report unread.** See step 6.

## **A note on delivery**

There is no email scheduling for reports in the product today — neither report type offers a schedule or recipient field. Producing from the template and sending it yourself is the current path, which is why step 6 is a short manual routine rather than an automation.

For a genuinely hands-off daily number, **Aria in Slack** is the closer fit. See [**Get your daily number in Slack without opening TrackIQ**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/daily-number-in-slack).

## **Related**

- [**Business Report Templates and the AI Report Generator**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/report-templates-and-ai-generator) — steps 2 to 4.
- [**Understanding Business Reports**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/understanding-business-reports) — the reports themselves.
- [**Weekly Business Reports and AI-Generated Insights**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/weekly-business-reports-and-ai-generated-insights) — the built-in weekly view.
- [**How to Create an AI-Powered Insight Report**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/how-to-create-an-ai-powered-insight-report) — step 5.
- [**Build a Monthly Board Pack**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/build-a-monthly-board-pack) — the monthly version, for a different room.