Your champion loves the deck. The CFO will never see most of it. By the time a business case reaches the person who approves the money, it has minutes, not an hour, and it is being read by someone who was not in any of your meetings.

So the question is not how to build a great deck. It is which five slides survive contact with a CFO. Here they are, in the order that works.

Why five slides

The long business case is for your own rigour. It proves you did the work. But the approval meeting is decided on a handful of things: the baseline, the numbers and their assumptions, the full cost, the downside, and the ask. Everything else is backup you bring only if asked.

A CFO is not evaluating your product. They are deciding whether this money is better spent here than somewhere else. Five slides, in order, let them make that call without hunting for what matters.

The five slides

1. The cost of inaction

Before you mention your solution, name the cost of doing nothing, in money, tied to something the CFO already tracks. Not "reconciliation is slow." Instead: "reconciliation costs 340 hours a quarter, about 61,000 dollars in fully loaded time." You earn the right to ask for budget by first showing what the problem already takes.

2. The financial case

Three columns, not one number. Conservative, base, upside. Same inputs, different assumptions, each one labelled as an assumption: adoption rate, hours saved, fully loaded cost per hour, annual impact. Built on their numbers, so they cannot wave it away as vendor math.

3. The total investment

Put the full year-one number on the slide yourself, before anyone asks. License, implementation, internal team time, ongoing management. Hiding a cost is the fastest way to lose the room, because the moment they find the gap, they stop trusting every other number.

4. Risk and governance

Answer the question nobody says out loud: what if this goes wrong? Accountability, with a named sponsor and a review cadence. Reversibility, in the contract terms. Proof, from a reference customer with a similar risk profile. Finance approves what it can defend if it fails.

5. The decision

A real ask has three parts: amount, date, problem solved. "We are asking for approval of X by this date, to solve this problem." No hedging, no "next steps." A CFO can say yes to that in the room.

The order does the work

Lead with the cost of inaction and the investment slide lands as a comparison, not a price tag. Put the total cost up before they ask and the risk slide reads as confidence, not defensiveness. Each slide sets up the next, the same way a good business case always has.

Get the template

You do not need to design this from scratch. The free 5-slide business case template gives you the five slides already laid out, with the prompts and the blanks in place, so you bring your deal and not a blank page. Download it here.

Before you build the slides, make sure the underlying story holds together. That is what the Value Story Canvas is for. And before the meeting that gets you to this point, do the prep in the business problem diagnosis.