Presenting Financial Information

Poor reports breed poor decisions, and many organisation’s monthly management reports are not well suited to their purpose. There may be too many reports–often with conflicting information, or reports may be too detailed or too complex to understand.

Poor reporting arises from a lack of clarity of their purpose; too many performance indicators with no clear vision; and poor understanding of what the reports and the KPIs behind them actually mean.

This course aims to set out a clear path for reporting financial information. It cannot solve all the problems of management, but it can help learners understand the principles and structure you need to put in place to ensure that your reports are aligned with the organisation’s vision and do drive decisions which support the vision.

The focus of the course is financial information since this is the hardest to present clearly and understandably, and we cover principles of effective reports;the hierarchy of performance indicators linked to strategic goals; guidelines for designing reports; and three methods for presenting performance data.

Key Learning Points:

1. The main issues in presenting financial information
2. The hierarchy of performance indicators
3. The principles of effective reports
4. Guidelines for designing management reports
5. Three key methods of presenting data the Run Chart, the Control Chart and the Pareto Chart
6. Some additional examples of data visualisation
7. How to interpret performance data
8. How to support colleagues when giving feedback