Lock the numbers before you ask for the commentary, not at the same time

When you're building a P&L and a board commentary to go with it, it's tempting to ask for both in one go - hand over the two exports, ask for "a P&L and a summary for the board", and get a finished pack back in one pass. Don't. Do them as two separate steps, with a checkpoint in between.

Here's the problem with doing it in one pass: if the model gets a subtotal slightly wrong, or you spot a reconciliation issue and fix it, the commentary was written against the old number and nobody re-checks it, because the pack already reads as finished. You end up with a corrected P&L and a commentary that still describes the version you just replaced - and because both were generated together, they look like they belong together even when they don't.

The fix is a hard stop between the two. Build and reconcile the P&L first, read every number against the source data yourself, and only once you're genuinely confident the table is right do you paste that confirmed table into a second, separate prompt asking for the commentary. The commentary prompt should treat the P&L as a fixed input it's not allowed to recalculate - if it spots something that looks inconsistent, it should say so, not quietly adjust its wording to fit.

This costs you one extra step and one extra minute of re-reading a table you'd otherwise skim past on the way to the more interesting prose. It's the step that stops a boardroom conversation starting with someone asking why the summary and the table in front of them don't say the same thing.