If you want to boost your company’s performance, you must properly discover, retain, manage, and measure crucial business data through in-depth research and creating a good report.
Additionally, you need to define and measure success to tell how well your company is doing.
Moreover, you should concentrate on producing reports that are valuable and offer useful information. But how could you improve your reporting?
Based on my 14 years of experience, I identified 10 things you can do to make your reporting more valuable:
Table of Contents
#1: Audience
Review who should get it, why, and how it is going to be used.
#2: Timing of Good Report
Review how often and when you should send it.
#3: Push Vs. Pull
Determine if it should be retrieved on a web page (pull) or should be sent (push).
#4: Business Data
Add operational data in addition to the financial data.
#5: Format the Report
Choose the format with the most added value. For example, you can choose between PDF, Excel, PowerPoint, a webpage, or an email.
#6: Standardize
Use the same color, code font, and abbreviations. Standardize as much as you can.
#7: Declutter
Try to eliminate as much unnecessary information as possible.
#8: Comments
You can include commentaries to add extra value and context.
#9: Good Report Needs to be Reusable
Make it easily reused in a presentation (size, colors, font).
10. Self-explanatory
The report should speak for itself. Therefore, use titles, highlights, shapes, footnotes & comments.
The Bottom Line – Importance of A Good Report
High-quality information is essential to the effective administration of your business, and good reports encourage improved internal decision-making. Therefore, providing high-quality business reports is in the best interest of good management and the functioning of your company.
Additionally, you can take my course to learn how to make them better for finance professionals who wish to transition into a new role.
You can also subscribe to my newsletter to receive more tips and insights about finance, FP&A, and controlling.
