The corporate reporting landscape has evolved significantly in the last few years, particularly with the increase in the non-financial reporting space, such as sustainability or environmental, social and governance reporting.
These changes in the reporting landscape have resulted in organisations having to prepare new reports, increasing the number of corporate reports prepared.
The demand for new reports has led to increased strain on financial and human resources. Organisations have to question the utility of each report.
Some of the reports include financial reports, audit reports, governance reports, annual reports, operational reports, and regulatory and other statutory reports.
Including sustainability reporting in this potpourri of reports adds a layer of complexity that organisations have to manage. While the reasons for preparing various reports differ, organisations must take time to reassess the utility of their corporate reports to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their reporting process. Here are the benefits of such a process
An essential feature of good corporate reporting is to provide information comprehensively in one place and avoid repetition. An assessment of a collection of reports enables the organisation to understand where specific information is located, helping with document indexing to enable easy location of information.
This way, organisations can easily have a document index of material information that can be referred to when reports need to be prepared or information collated for regulatory reporting or to meet specific stakeholder information needs.
Organisations should expect the information needs of stakeholders to continue to grow in the future.
Therefore, the optimal approach is to have particular material information well managed, easily accessed and prepared when required rather than focusing on preparing separate reports.
Another reason to perform this assessment is to determine areas of overlaps across multiple reports that could result in combining these multiple existing reports into a single report to reduce the complexity, cost and burden of preparing many reports.
One report that helps achieve this is the integrated report. The integrated report can provide a concise and connected picture of how information from different reports provides a holistic picture of how an organisation creates and preserves value over time. Such reports could add significant value to corporate reporting process.
The writer is a Partner at Deloitte East Africa. He is an author who writes and speaks widely on corporate reporting topics.
