Cutting Financial Reports Down To Size

Have you ever attended a meeting of corporate brass where the CFO read the income statement line by line and every so often someone asked for an explanation? Although the information conveyed is important, such meetings can be interminable. If you tallied the total per-hour compensation of the attendees, you might wonder whether there’s a better, and much cheaper, way to communicate this information.

The good news: There is.

The better news: The solution is simple and fast and adds no cost to finance department operations.

Even better news: Each person at the meeting will come away with information he or she really needs, no more, no less.

LESS DATA, MORE INFORMATION
If you’re the CFO or the staff person who prepares the financial report for that meeting, ask yourself: What kinds of information do the meetings attendees really need? In my experience, most managers need only summarized financial data. Details can be provided separately for those who need them.

However, and this is critical, just because the information is summarized, don't assume you can take shortcuts in preparing the statements. In fact, you also should prepare a thorough comparison of monthly expenses. That data should be compared with forecasts and then distilled into a brief, informative presentation focused on significant indicators: pretax net income, key operating information (each company has its own set of key data), sales, costs and variances from budget. Determining which indicators to break out is the art of designing a key indicator report.

A typical financial summary report would contain balance sheet and income statement summaries, a break-even analysis, charts of key ratios and the following key financial information:

In addition, the report would include variances from budget such as

And it would include data on trends and comments, for example

• Packaging supplies are trending up.

• Gross profit is down by _______% for two months, need to evaluate.

• Monthly net sales level is $__________ over (under).

• Monthly gross profit is up (down) _______%.

• Resulting gross profit is $__________ over (under).

• Expenditures that are over budget:
      Travel and entertainment are over by $__________.

The summarized income statement and balance sheet each should take no more than one sheet of paper. The break-even calculation is especially helpful to growing companies because they have a tendency to pick up overhead easily. Use graphs and ratios to highlight significant information.

Taken together, these data provide a clear financial picture that’s easy to understand without being overly technical. But more important, the report keeps everyone focused on the big picture without being distracted by the details. Any significant variances or trends can be addressed separately.

THE GAAP GAP
GAAP financial statements are uniform and therefore provide a level playing field for the users of financial information such as bankers or investors. Because of our training, we accountants may feel strange preparing statements that aren’t strictly in accordance with GAAP. Corporate managers, however, find such reports useful because they focus primarily on trends.

Take employee compensation in a manufacturing company as an example. Such expenses are spread throughout the income statement, generally in each of the cost areas: direct and indirect, selling and marketing, indirect labor and general and administrative. Compensation may be broken down further into officer, supervisory and staff compensation. In a typical report, such costs get buried within the overall costs for the respective departments. Likewise for rent expense, which typically is coded to the respective profit center or location and allocated among various departments. In both cases, the big picture is hidden. From managements point of view, the more departments, the more complex the statements and the more key information is buried.

FLUCTUATING COSTS
Suppose some marketing expenses are subject to large year-to-year fluctuations while most of them stay the same. Instead of analyzing these fluctuations each period, why not just make them line items on a summary income statement? The expenses that don’t fluctuate significantly can be grouped together. Using that strategy provides an income statement that highlights larger categories of expense, those that fluctuate greatly, and manageable expenses.

Of course, a summarized report doesn’t replace a GAAP income statement, but it provides additional information that’s very useful to managers of the business.

Below is a sample of such a report. Cost of goods sold, the general and administrative figures and selling and marketing categories are shown net of compensation, payroll taxes, fringe benefits and rent. Assume that compensation is the largest expense other than materials and that overtime and incentive compensation triggers large fluctuations. Also, assume that travel and entertainment and trade show expenses vary greatly from month to month, causing the income statement to fluctuate greatly. These expenses can be broken out into line items.

In sum, business entities, especially growing companies, need cost-effective operational and financial data that focus less on details and more on key indicators and exception reporting. This approach is advantageous for CFOs in two ways:

• It takes very little extra effort to prepare the summarized reports.

• It reinforces what only the finance department can provide corporate leaders: a sure-fire tool to help them fulfill their main responsibility, keeping their eyes trained on the big picture.