Running a business successfully and ethically means relying on financial reporting. The success or failure of your company for a specific period of time can be seen through a financial report. A financial report can also forecast the future position and financial outcomes of the company and can help improve the financial status of your firm.
How does Financial Reporting Benefit your Organization?
You need accurate, transparent financial reports to consign surplus stock. You need valuable insight into the money your firm has made in sales, where it has come from, whether it comes from your target demographic or not, or your future expenses and how to account for them. You can receive this insight and assistance from a financial report. It can help you to greatly organize your finances for the next quarter.
The most common benefits of financial reporting are as follows.
- Improvement in Debt Management: You can gain clarity about the past and current financial status of your business. This helps you form a financial plan to eliminate debt as much as possible and manage it efficiently.
- Helping Exit Strategies: A key part of knowing how to run a business is when to let go. You can gain a valuable look into your company’s profits and results, allowing you to
- form an exit strategy in time or sell your company. Your company should not be gathering dust on a shelf, when it’s time to let go, you must do so while minimizing losses.
- Increasing Accountability: The working employees are often observed during a financial report. This helps a company hold its employees accountable for their actions and performance. It also applies healthy pressure on the employees to prove their worth and make the most of their time at the company.
- Helping Differentiation: You can compare your financial reports with those of other companies, to know what sets you apart from them. You can monetize these differences or work towards enhancing them to set yourself apart from your competitors.
- Identification of Trends: A financial report analyzes trends in your firm’s financial transactions. Knowledge of these trends can give you an insight into the transactions you want to focus more on, and the transactions you want to do away with. This will help your company make better business decisions
- Identification of Liabilities: A financial report can identify a potential liability before it takes place. These reports usually give you an understanding of what your company owes and what’s been taken care of. This helps you determine if there are financial problems in the near future that you can prepare your firm for.
- Identification of Liquidity: A financial report helps you analyze whether or not a certain debt can be paid off in the future or not, providing financial insight into liquidities. A large role is played by financial reports in customers, investors, and partners identifying your firm as “healthy” or “unhealthy.
- Recognition of Revenue: For SaaS companies, insight into revenue recognition is a need. You need an understanding of whether revenue is coming from sales that have been made, which can help you increase sales in the future, forecasting future revenues. For taxation purposes, it is essential to know whether revenue has been recorded correctly or not. Financial reports help greatly with this.
- Gives you Financial Insight: Specific and actionable insights are given to you through financial reports. This helps your management make better and more efficient financial decisions.
- Better Management of Cash Flow: A financial report is best suited for helping you manage your cash flow. They tell you where your money is going and how you can pay your employees better and curb overspending. You can also gain insight into whether you have enough net profit from sales for payroll expenses or other future expenses.
Why is Financial Reporting Vital for Your Business?
Statistics prove that businesses using financial reports are able to leverage that data to make more informed and efficient decisions for their finances. These businesses are able to create and use proficient marketing reports to increase productivity by 15 to 20%. Timeliness and
accuracy of reports benefit your organization greatly. They provide snapshots of activities to executives, business owners, stakeholders, the accounting team, and other customers.
Here are some reasons that prove that financial reports are vital to your company.
Financial Transparency: The finance team of your company, along with the executive team and stakeholders need accurate and timely financial reports to help the working of the firm. Timely financial reports also help workers and clients understand the operations of your business. Here are some metrics that can help your company obtain financial transparency.
Operating Expenses Versus Income Ratio: This ratio refers to the ratio between executive compensation and the average pay of employees. Usually, a financial statement will categorize them as different expenditures, giving stakeholders confidence, and allowing them to make informed decisions about investment in the company.
For SaaS companies, financial transparency is vital as many stakeholders are not keen on investing in companies that are yet to make profits. Giving these stakeholders a report on the operations of the company and what you are doing to earn more profits builds faith in your company. Transparency is key to alleviating skepticism.
Financial reports also contain reports of accounting performance, allowing clients and investors to make informed decisions.
Tax Liability Assessment: Financial reports can get you to gauge the level of your tax liability and prepare to file your taxes correctly. This information about the level of future tax liability is given to you in two ways through a financial statement
Balance Sheet: The balance sheet contains a list of all assets, liabilities, net worth, and equity holdings such as stocks and bonds.
Expenditures: A financial report makes a concise list of expenditures depending on cost type. You get a report on where your money is going, helping with the calculation of tax liability. A vital source of information for an organization is a financial report because it provides a report of what expenses need to be subtracted from gross profit. They make your work easier by calculating net income and how much tax your company owes.
Error Mitigation: Errors in accounting can be mitigated through a thorough financial report. Expenditures are categorized based on their cost type which allows observation of the expected amount of expenditure in one category versus the actual expenditure in that category.
A financial report not only builds trust with stakeholders but also allows you to correct mistakes in accounting before they become too big to handle.
Elimination of Skepticism: Transparency is vital for eliminating doubts and skepticism in the minds of stakeholders. You can use a financial statement for the verification of the accuracy of any accounting discrepancies. You can correct errors and gain a better understanding of what the expenditures of your company should look like, as opposed to what they look like now. You can arrange your expenses to earn more profits, evaluate tax liability, and gain the trust of your investors and clients alike.
Conclusion
Financial transparency is not only one of the building blocks for trust, it is also a building block for profitability. You need financial statements to give you an idea about how your firm is currently operating versus how it should be operating. You can also present them to clients and stakeholders to give them financial information about the operations of your company. You also need financial transparency and properly maintained financial reports to consign surplus stock.