Finance

Financial Reporting to the Board

Boards are often inundated with information for their meetings. Reassessing reporting methods can enhance board performance, efficiency and help boards to meet corporate law responsibilities. This article concentrates on some ideas for financial reporting, a particularly challenging area of reporting for many boards. Two key principles are: less is more and top down. Less is more when financial reporting is well formatted and presents clear, concise and relevant information. This will usually be a mixture of numbers, text, graphical representation and detail reported by exception.

The True Cost of Business

We commonly relate cost of doing business with the monetary cost of inputs to deliver an output. However, true or full cost and costing involves detailed identification, categorisation, measurement and valuation of ALL resource inputs required to achieve the objectives of the activity, program and ultimately, the purpose of an organisation. As part of good organisational governance, it is the Board’s role to establish the framework, methodology and approved policies under which service costing (and eventually pricing) is managed.