Reporting

What it means

Reporting is the regular supply of information about performance to the people who decide on it: owners, management, the bank, the parent company. Unlike the annual accounts it has no statutory form - it follows the recipient’s needs.

A good pack has three properties: the same structure every month, a comparison against the prior period or plan, and a short comment on what moved and why.

Reporting answers what happened, not why or what to do next. Analysis looks for causes and a forecast deals with the future; reporting is the base for both, which is why it has to stay stable even when management’s questions change from month to month.

How it works in practice

The core of a monthly pack for a small company: revenue and cost by type, the result, cash, receivables and payables by age, and stock levels. Detail by site or product comes from sub-accounts.

The headline figures belong on one page - a dashboard with five to seven KPIs. Deeper analysis only pays once the base is reliable; that is also the precondition for business intelligence.

For the bank we prepare reporting under the loan agreement: on the agreed dates, the statements and the covenant calculations exactly as the agreement defines them. Those figures must reconcile to the books and the annual accounts, because the bank compares them at its yearly review.

What to watch out for

A pack arriving on the 25th for last month can only be noted. Reporting loses value with every day of delay, so speeding up the close is worth more than adding another table.

When a metric’s definition changes without a note, the report starts to mislead. Show turnover once including recharged costs and once without, and the year-on-year comparison shows growth that never happened; every change of method therefore belongs in the commentary and is applied back to the comparative period.