To turn a revenue report into a video for your team, do not narrate the report. Pick the headline number, explain what moved it using a revenue bridge (last quarter's total, each driver as a step up or down, this quarter's total), and end with what the team should do differently. Write that as a script of 450 to 750 words, which is a 3 to 5 minute video at 150 spoken words a minute, with one number per scene. Keep every figure exactly as it appears in the report, check each one on screen before sharing, and confirm your company allows the figures to leave the finance system. The video replaces the meeting where everyone squints at a spreadsheet, not the spreadsheet itself.

Why reports do not get read, and what a video can fix

A quarterly revenue report is built for the people who produced it. It has every segment, every month, every variance, and a commentary column written in the passive voice. Most of the team opens it, looks at the top-line number, and closes it.

That is not laziness. A table does not tell you which numbers matter. Finance knows that the 3 per cent dip in the enterprise segment is noise and the 0.4 point rise in churn is a problem. The rest of the company sees two numbers in two cells of equal size.

A short video can do what the table cannot: put the numbers in an order, say which ones matter, and show how they connect. It can also be watched by the person in another time zone who missed the all-hands. What it should not try to do is replace the report. Link to the full report from the video and from the message you send it in.

Choose three numbers, not thirty

Before writing anything, answer three questions from the report.

1. What is the headline? Total revenue for the quarter and how it compares with the previous quarter, or with the plan. One number, one comparison.
2. What moved it? Usually three to five drivers: new customers, expansion from existing customers, churn, price changes, currency, a one-off deal.
3. What should the team do with this? The decision or the change in focus the numbers support. If the answer is "nothing", say so; that is useful too.

Everything else stays in the report. If a regional manager wants their region's detail, they have the link.

The revenue bridge is the whole video

The most useful single picture for a revenue update is a bridge, sometimes called a waterfall or a revenue walk. It starts with last quarter's total on the left, adds and subtracts each driver as a step, and lands on this quarter's total on the right. Every viewer can follow it, because it is just arithmetic drawn left to right.

It is also a self-checking structure. The steps must add up. If they do not, either the report has an unexplained gap or you have left a driver out, and you want to find that before the team does.

Worked example: a Q3 revenue analysis

Take a fictional software company. The figures below are illustrative, chosen so the arithmetic works.

Check it: 4.20 plus 0.38 plus 0.17 minus 0.11 plus 0.04 minus 0.06 is 4.62. Growth is 0.42 million, which is 10 per cent on Q2.

Here is the core of the script, about 210 words. The full version adds more detail on each driver and a close, and runs about four minutes.

Q3 revenue was 4.62 million. That is up 10 per cent on Q2, and 2 per cent above plan.Here is how we got from Q2 to Q3.We started the quarter at 4.20 million.New customers added 0.38 million. That is the biggest single step, and most of it came from the September launch in the Nordic markets.Existing customers expanded by 0.17 million, mostly teams adding seats.Churn took away 0.11 million. That number matters more than its size suggests, because it is up from 0.07 million in Q2. Two thirds of it came from customers in their first six months.The starter plan price change added 0.04 million.And currency cost us 0.06 million, because the euro weakened against the dollar over the quarter. Nothing we did, and nothing we can do.So: 4.20 million in, 4.62 million out.What should we take from this? New business is working. Expansion is steady. The thing to watch is early churn: customers are leaving in their first six months at a faster rate than last quarter. In Q4, onboarding is the priority for customer success, and product will look at the three features new customers ask about most in their first month.

The scene list:

1. The headline: 4.62 million, written large, with "plus 10 per cent on Q2" under it.
2. An empty axis with Q2 on the left at 4.20 million.
3. A step up for new customers, labelled with the amount and "Nordic launch".
4. A smaller step up for expansion.
5. A step down for churn, with the Q2 churn figure drawn faintly beside it for comparison.
6. A small step up for price.
7. A step down for currency, labelled "outside our control".
8. The finished bridge, landing at 4.62 million on the right.
9. The churn step circled, with "first six months" written beside it.
10. The Q4 priorities, two lines, one per team.

Notice the order: headline first, then mechanism, then consequence. Nobody should have to wait three minutes to find out whether it was a good quarter.

Getting the numbers right, and keeping them private

This is where a revenue video can go badly wrong, so treat it as part of the job rather than a final check.

• Copy figures, do not retype them. Paste numbers from the report into your script so a typo does not become an official figure.
• Use the same units everywhere. Pick millions or thousands, pick one decimal convention, and use it in every scene and every line. "0.38 million" and "380k" in the same video make people stop and do arithmetic.
• Check the drawn numbers against the script. Generated visuals can render a figure or a label wrong even when the narration is correct. Pause on every scene with a number and compare it with the report. Fix any that differ.
• Check the bridge adds up on screen. If the steps drawn do not visibly reach the final total, viewers notice.
• Ask before you upload. Revenue figures are often confidential, and if your company is publicly listed, unreleased quarterly results are exactly the kind of information that must not leak before the announcement. Check your company's policy on putting financial data into third-party tools, and share the video only through the channels your figures are allowed to travel through.

Make it

1. 1

   Pull the three numbers from the report

   Headline, the three to five drivers that moved it, and the one thing the team should do. Write them on a single page with the source cell for each.

2. 2

   Build the bridge and check the arithmetic

   Last quarter, each driver, this quarter. The steps must sum to the final total. If they do not, find the missing driver before you write a word of script.

3. 3

   Write the script at 150 words a minute

   Headline first, then each step of the bridge in order, then the consequence and the ask. 450 to 750 words gives you 3 to 5 minutes.

4. 4

   Paste it into openCanviz with Keep my wording

   Keep my wording makes the narration exactly what you wrote, so every figure is read as it appears in the report. Set the target length; a clean whiteboard or poster style suits financial material.

5. 5

   Check every number on screen

   Pause on each scene that shows a figure and compare it with the report. Edit any scene where a drawn label or number is wrong. Do this twice, the second time with someone from finance.

6. 6

   Send it with the report attached

   Share the video and the full report together, through the same internal channel the report normally uses, with the three numbers written in the message for anyone who will not press play.

Make it a routine, not a one-off

The first revenue video takes an afternoon. The second takes an hour, because the structure is the same every quarter: headline, bridge, consequence. Keep the script from last quarter, duplicate the project, and change the figures and the drivers. Over a year, the team learns to read the bridge without being told how, which is the real point.

If the audience is new starters rather than the existing team, you may want a different video altogether, one that explains how the company makes money before it explains any particular quarter. That is closer to an onboarding video; see how to make an employee onboarding video.

Common questions

Should a manager narrate it, or a generated voice? Your own voice carries more weight with your own team, especially for the part about what to do next. You can generate the video first, then replace the voice with your recording. See how to add a voiceover to a whiteboard video.

How long should a revenue update video be? Three to five minutes for a quarter. If you are past seven, you are narrating the report rather than explaining it.

Can I just turn the PDF report into a video directly? You can, but a report is written to be read, and a straight conversion tends to read out tables. Pull the three numbers and write a script first. How to turn a PDF into a video covers the general rewrite.

What about comparing segments or regions? Use a side-by-side scene rather than another bridge, and limit it to two or three segments. How to explain a comparison in a video has patterns for that.

Is it a problem if the quarter was bad? No, and it is where a video helps most. Say the headline plainly in the first sentence, show what drove it, and spend the most time on what the team will change.