Four Vital Financial Reports
As a CPA, you want to care for your clients and provide them with everything they need to make prudent financial decisions. Financial reports are at the top of the list of how you provide vital information to your clients. You have much knowledge to offer, but finding the balance between information overload and too little data can be challenging. If you provide your clients with confusing reports containing graphs without explanation and statements filled with over-their-head accounting jargon, they will skim them and move on with their day. You are leading them down the path of making critical business decisions without the most up-to-date information. The same result will happen if you send them reports with the most basic information without context to help them understand. There is a happy medium, and Reach Reporting has created it for you. The Financial Reports you need to send. If you have taken an advisory role with your clients, there are individual reports you should provide your clients. Each month, quarter, and year you need to prepare and deliver specific financial reports to each client. By doing this, along with educating them on how to read and understand each report, you provide them with all the tools they need to run their business and make the best decisions possible. Let’s break down which reports we believe you need to create and when you should send them. Then we can talk about the best practices on how to build and deliver them.
Monthly
- Cash Management – A comprehensive overview of your client’s organization’s liquidity and cash flow.
- Profit and Loss– A critical look into the companies’ income statements and earnings in several essential business areas.
- Financial Performance – An overview of how efficiently the business spends capital while providing a snapshot of your balance sheet’s primary metrics.
- Financial Statement – Focused on the data relevant for the chief financial officers (CFOs) who need to grasp high-level metrics such as revenue, gross profit, operating expenses, net income, etc.
Quarterly
- Quarterly Earnings—Provide decision-makers with an overview of sales, expenses, and net income for the most recent quarter.
- Cash Flow Statement—The cash flow statement is a standardized document that clarifies a company’s cash flow at a given point in time.
- Balance Sheet—A statement of a company’s financial standing that indicates its assets, liabilities, and owner’s equity for a quarterly period.
- Income Statement – This report section shows the business’s quarterly profit or loss.
Annual
- Balance Sheets – A recap of the company’s assets, liabilities, and equity at the end of the year.
- Income statement – A more reliable and complete view of the company’s activities during the year.
- Stockholder Equity – Simply recaps the transactions that affected the equity account during the period.
- Cash Flow Statement – Splits cash flows into three main sections; operations, investing, and financing.
Fiscal Year-To-Date
- Year-To-Date returns – Show profit made by an investment since the first of the current year. Investors and analysts use YTD information to assess the performance of assets and portfolios.
- Year-To-Date Earnings – Small business owners use YTD earnings to track financial goals and estimate quarterly tax payments.
- Month to Date vs. Year to Date—This Will Allow decision–makers to analyze their income, business earnings, and investment returns for the month.
Creating Effective Reports
That feels like a lot of information for you to create and build for your clients. Don’t become overwhelmed by that list. You can do this. It feels a little daunting, but there are ways to simplify and reduce the time required to provide the reports your clients pay you to provide.
Create Reports Quickly
Reach Reporting should be your new best friend. Why? Because the most challenging part of reporting financial data is not how many reports you should be providing, but it is communicating the right story to the right audience at the right time. Additionally, those reports need to be effective and created efficiently. By bridging the knowledge gap between accountant and client and providing a platform to create impactful reports, Reach Reporting has established itself as the industry’s best reporting tool. Reach Reporting has four game-changing features (among many other features). Each one makes creating and providing critical reports painless and faster. Plus, the reports are more informative than ever before.
Report Templates
The template library is a massive time-saver in report generation. Once you have synced the data, pick a template, and your report is complete. The library is updated with new templates monthly, providing a wide range of auto-populated reports, spreadsheets, metrics, and statements that help you quickly display actionable information.
Automation
This feature is where the magic begins to happen! The ability to add live text anywhere in your templates is more life-changing than sliced bread. Connect a company, and the template will pull live data from your accounting software! Creating reports has never been this easy.
Sharable Templates
Once you have created a report (whether from a template or built from scratch), you can share it with your other clients’ companies. You are making it even easier to save time while continuing to provide special reports. Manage your entire templated elements and share them with all the company connections you manage. Reach isn’t just a report builder; it’s a financial storytelling system.
Customization
Build as many custom reports, spreadsheets, or metric templates as you want. Save them in your library so you can quickly re-use them to jump-start new reports. Create custom spreadsheets with advanced formulas. All of which will save you hours each week. Becoming your client’s valued and trusted advisor is the goal of most CPAs. Your knowledge, wisdom, and experience are what your clients want and need to succeed and meet their financial objectives. Partnering with Reach Reporting will transform you from an accountant into a financial storyteller. It will give you the tools to not only provide the necessary reports but to provide them in less time and with more understandable data than ever before. Reach Reporting enables accountants to create simple-to-read, elegant, and professional reports while also empowering accountants with powerful and intuitive functionality. With Reach Reporting, creating reports is no longer a chore but a pleasure.
Build Relationships
It frees up your time, so you can spend more time building relationships with your clients and helping them succeed. Reach Reporting makes your life easier and empowers you to provide more value to your clients. Give Reach Reporting a try and see the difference it can make in your practice.