18.3 PowerPoint and Pitchbooks

The 2026 Core Is a Refreshed Course

PowerPoint & Pitchbooks is core course 14. CFI's 27 February 2026 program refresh explicitly refreshed and modified this course (alongside splitting DCF into two cores and dropping Budgeting and Forecasting from core). The public course page lists about 4 hours 30 minutes, NASBA 4 CPE credits, instructor Ryan Spendelow, and learning objectives that include evaluating AI-assisted versus manually created pitchbook content for gaps in accuracy, structure, and professionalism. Study the refreshed core, not a 2024 recap.

The course distinguishes distributed presentations (printed or emailed pitchbooks that must stand alone) from live presentations (a spoken deck with tighter slides, backgrounds, icons, transitions). The FMVA final is closer to the distributed standard: an examiner reads your exhibit without you in the room. Do not hide the message in speaker notes.

Elective Communication and Presentation Skills for Finance Professionals replaced Presentation of Financial Information on the same 27 February 2026 date. It is not tested. Slide-Master skill from the core is tested.

CFI-Style Pitchbook Flow

A pitchbook is a structured argument, not a file dump. CFI's core build includes a pitchbook case, section dividers, company overview, Excel-linked tables and charts, a timeline, a valuation summary, team overview, executive summary, and table of contents. For the exam, compress that into four movements you can recite:

That sequence is situation → analysis → valuation → recommendation. Jumping to a $28 price on slide 1 without the WACC build is a sales brochure. Dumping 40 pages of analysis with no recommendation is a model printout.

Executive summary in CFI's course is often placed after the work in the file (you write it last) even if it is bound up front for the reader. On a timed case, write the recommendation when the football field is done, then put a four-bullet exec summary as page 1. Do not write the exec summary before the DCF lands; you will invent a title that the model does not support.

Company overview and a process timeline (CFI has dedicated timeline lessons) sit inside situation. They are not a substitute for analysis. A timeline of 'kickoff / first draft / IC' is logistics. A timeline of 'Year 0 actual, Years 1–5 explicit, terminal' is the DCF clock and belongs next to the driver table.

One Message Per Slide

Each slide carries one claim. If you need two claims, make two slides. The examiner should be able to read only the title and know the point.

Apex examples of one message:

• East, Central, and West all beat the lock; company revenue is $86.1 million versus $80.0 million.
• Gross profit is $2.65 million favorable only after a $1.05 million COGS rate miss.
• The extra 100,000 units are a volume story, not a price cut.

Alder examples of one message:

• WACC is 9.0% from the 60/40 stack, not a rounded 10%.
• Terminal value is 76.2% of enterprise value.
• Gordon year-end DCF implies $26.02 versus the $24.00 market.

Do not put the football field, the WACC build, and the sensitivity table on one slide. That is three messages. CFI's valuation-summary lesson is a final layout and polish of one range chart, not a license to shrink every exhibit onto a single page.

Titles Are Conclusions, Not Topics

CFI-aligned (and banking-standard) titles state the finding. Topic titles force the reader to do the analysis. The working example in this chapter's brief is the same rule: Revenue grew 12% on volume beats Revenue. Apex's model does not say 12%; it says 7.6% with volume and a $1.00 price increase. Never write 12% on a slide because a template used 12%.

A conclusion title that disagrees with the chart is worse than a topic title. If the waterfall shows +$2.65 million and the title says +$6.1 million, you copied the revenue beat onto a gross-profit slide.

Consistency with the Model: Units, Dates, Shares

Every number on a slide must be traceable to a model cell. That is the same integrity rule section 18.4 applies to DCF exhibits; it starts in the pitchbook.

• Units: Alder is $ millions. Writing EV 2,071,000 without a unit, or mixing $ millions and $ thousands on adjacent slides, is a fail.
• Dates: FY2026 actual versus FY2025 lock; Year 5 of the DCF is not calendar 2026 unless the model says so. Alder Year 0 was the last historical year in Chapter 15. Label the year the model uses.
• Share count: 50.0 million fully diluted shares. Dividing $1,301 million by basic shares if the model used diluted is an integrity break.
• Rounding: $2,070.6 million rounded to $2,071 million on the slide must match the rounding note on the exhibit. Do not round EV to $2.1 billion on slide 4 and $2,071 million on slide 5.
• Percent versus turns: WACC 9.0%, EV/EBITDA 8.0x — never 9x WACC.

CFI lessons on inserting a table from Excel and inserting a chart from Excel exist so the slide inherits the model. If you retype $26.02 by hand, you will ship $26.20 after the next WACC tick. Link or paste with a refresh process; do not re-key a football field.

Slide Master, Guides, Theme Colors

CFI's setup block is testable as process, not as click-by-click trivia:

• Slide size: pick widescreen 16:9 or the house 4:3 once; do not mix sizes inside one deck.
• Theme colors: lock corporate or bank colors so every chart series is consistent with Excel. A blue actual series on slide 3 and a green actual series on slide 7 is a decoding tax.
• Slide Master: logos, fonts, footers, and page numbers live on the master — except the title layout, where a full-bleed title often has no logo clutter. CFI's tidying-up-the-Slide-Master lesson is that cleanup.
• Guides: alignment so tables and charts share a left margin. CFI has a dedicated alignment lesson.
• Section dividers and a table of contents for a distributed pitchbook.

Live-deck extras (background photos, color filters, crop-to-shape, icons, transitions, animations) are in the course's live presentation module. On the FMVA final, animations are a risk: they hide content from a static PDF. Prefer the distributed style unless the prompt says you are presenting live.

AI-Assisted Pitchbooks, 2026 Objective

The refreshed course asks you to evaluate AI-assisted content. The exam-relevant test is accuracy against the model, not whether a chatbot can make a pretty cover:

• If a draft writes Revenue grew 12% on volume and Apex's model says 7.6% with a $1.00 price increase, the slide is wrong.
• If it drops preferred and NCI from the equity bridge, equity is overstated by $80 million ($50 + $30) and the per-share figure is $27.62 instead of $26.02.
• If it averages Summit's 21.0x into the trading-comp mean, you repeat Chapter 16's outlier trap and lift implied EV by $300 million on Northline's $150 million of EBITDA.

AI is a draft. The FMVA Honor Pledge still sits on your numbers. Evaluating AI-assisted versus manual slides is a 2026 learning objective, not a permission to skip the football field.

Exam traps on pitchbooks

• Treating PowerPoint & Pitchbooks as unchanged since before the 27 February 2026 refresh, or as an elective.
• Topic titles (Revenue, WACC, Valuation) instead of concluding titles.
• Two messages on one slide, or a 40-page dump with no recommendation.
• Mixing 16:9 and 4:3, or a live-animation deck submitted as a static case exhibit.
• Retyped numbers that no longer match the model after a driver change.
• An LBO sources-and-uses from an elective on a going-concern core case.