One thing that CFOs must constantly do is to present reports in board meetings.
Rising shareholder activity, high visibility board failures, and increasing regulatory demands have led to increased expectations of the board’s performance. As a result, directors are now engaging deeply and more often with CFOs.
Thus, here are 5 tips to help CFOs improve their board reporting:
#1: Know Your Audience
Understanding the perspective your board has will help in creating the reports in a manner that better answers all their queries and gives them exactly what they are looking for.
#2: Be Transparent
Definitely a saying that holds true for all business processes, being transparent is an extremely essential part of reporting. If you are able to convey the real financial situation of the company, the board will be able to make better-informed decisions, factoring in all the crucial reasons that affect the company’s performance.
#3: Provide Context
Simply providing figures, graphs, and charts will not be useful to the board. Instead of showing a percentage change figure, it is always a better idea to talk about what those numbers mean and how they impact broader issues and opportunities facing the organization.
#4: Be Consistent
Consistency is the key to success. Make sure that your reports are consistent in format and are easy to understand and draw insights from. For instance, if the financial year 2015-2016 is considered as the base year for comparing revenue performance, it should be considered as the base for comparing other metrics too. This helps align the whole presentation, as well as to understand the holistic performance of the company.
#5: Ramp up your credibility
Definitely the most important factor is to cross-check and verify all facts and figures stated in the presentation. This is because if there is even the slightest error in any kind of information, it will largely impact the strategies formed and decisions taken.
Incorporating these 5 practices into your report making procedure will help you improve your board reports drastically.
If you want to know more about board reporting for CFOs, click the link below for more information.
