Paul BarnhurstFP&A Expert Empowering Finance Professionals to Excel Everday

Stop presenting every piece of data.

11 Sept 2026 · 1 min

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In this brief segment, the speaker highlights a frequent error among FP&A teams: treating exploratory "walking" decks and presentation-focused "explanatory" decks as the same. Exploratory decks serve as comprehensive reference tools, containing all relevant charts, graphs, and data so that individual departments, teams, or customer portfolios can investigate details and ask questions. Explanatory decks, by contrast, are meant for live presentations and must be curated—prioritizing the most critical information that will drive decisions in a specific meeting. The speaker stresses the need to consciously separate these two deck types and to apply selective emphasis when preparing presentation decks.

Chapters

The most important mistake I see is that most FP&A teams don't make the difference between a walking deck and a deck that's supposed to be presented. I often talk about the exploratory charts and graphs and decks and explanatory. The exploratory is supposed to be a reference where you have all the information available to make sure that people can see their own departments, their own teams, their own customer portfolio, etc. So it's supposed to be informative. And people are going to see something and ask questions about that. So it's the concept of exploring data. You can add some comments and so on, but here you just explain everything, you give everything. The only thing that when I use decks to present, so explanatory, that means that you have to sort of making a decision yourself on what to prioritize, what will matter in the meeting that we are having today, in the presentations I'm giving today.