Why does nobody read your management reports?
By Andrew Isaacs, CIMA Member in Practice ·
Nobody reads a management pack when it carries no insight or is written in jargon. The value is the two or three things that should change what you do next, said plainly and to your face. AI Finance Partners is not in the business of making paper; we make sure the point lands and gets acted on.
Why is a fat monthly pack a false comfort?
If nobody reads your management reports, the problem is almost never the reader. It is the report. A thick pack lands every month, everyone feels reassured the finances are in hand, and yet nothing in it changes a single decision. It costs money to produce, and it lets you feel on top of things when you are not, which is worse than nothing at all.
Length is not insight. Most of a fat pack goes unread, and the two or three things in it that actually matter are buried under tables nobody has time to work through. A report that does not get read, or does not get understood, is not really a report. It is a cost dressed up as control.
Length is not insight, and most of a fat pack goes unread.
What should good reporting give you?
The value was never in the pack. It is in the handful of things in the numbers that should change what you do next, said plainly, and said to your face. One clear sentence about the customer who has gone quiet, the service quietly losing money, or the cash squeeze coming in three months is worth more than fifty pages of tables. It is also the bit a consultant will not do, because a consultant leaves a document and disappears, and the job is done whether or not anything happens.
AI Finance Partners is not a consultancy and never calls itself one, because the value is in turning up month after month and making the numbers change what you do, not in the document left behind. A qualified accountant signs everything, because judgement is the thing you are really paying for. So judge your reporting by what you did differently because of it, not by how thick it is. You can see how we work with small businesses here.
Andrew Isaacs is a CIMA Member in Practice and Practising Certificate Holder, and the founder of AI Finance Partners, the outsourced finance function for professional services firms turning over £500k to £5m across the South East. Legal cashiering is not part of what we do.