Reporting

You will need to prepare regular financial reports for your board or senior management. The most common kinds of reports are:

• Profit and Loss statement, which shows how much profit or loss was made during the reporting period.
• Balance sheet at the end of the reporting period, which shows the assessts and liabilities at the end of the reporting period.
• A Cash Flow statement, which shows how much cash is coming into and going out, and how much cash it holds.

The board might also ask you for information relating to a specific problem so they can solve it.

Before you start, find out your organization's existing policy and/or procedure for providing accounting information to management. You will need to follow them whenever they apply. You may also need to see how previous reports were done and ask how managers want you to improve on them.

Structure and format

The structure and format of your budgets and reports need to be clear and easy to read, as they will normally be used as a basis for making decisions and measuring achievement of performance objectives.

The board will probably specify the kinds of information they want. e.g. debts payable and receivable, cash at bank, assets, depreciation, year to date figures compared to budget, comparisons with the same quarter or month last year, etc. Many kinds of reports also make assumptions, so they need to be listed in the documents. Some organizations simply insist that you use the same categories and accounts for the budget, the business plan, the bookkeeping accounts, and the reports. But perhaps not always. For example:

• If bank interest in the only kind of income in "Sundry income", you might prevent confusion by calling the category "Interest earned."
• You might join small categories together.
• You might need to split large categories up.

You might also need to produce a summary report for a wider readership, such as association members or shareholders. The summary report needs to be:

• be easy to understand
• give adequate disclosure
• prevent nit-pickers from asking frivolous questions