Board Reporting

What is a board report?

A board report summarises key company information and is used as a basis for discussion in board meetings. It provides an overview of company performance, financial metrics, key initiatives, issues and risks.

Why are board reports important?

The quality of board reports drives the quality of board meetings. Board meetings are the only way to keep track of a business.

If the board pack is substandard, difficult to understand or out-of-date, it compromises the board’s ability to resolve strategic issues and continue creating value.

What are the challenges?

Too long, too dull, too ugly, too opaque and always too late.

Are you bored or your board reports? Are you overwhelmed, frustrated and feeling it is yet another Groundhog Day? Is success surviving the meeting, not crafting a thriving business? Do you feel like you are reporting the score, not changing the score?

Board meetings should be the pinnacle of corporate standards. A board of directors exists to create control, governance and accountability. It should be the most organised, economical, focused and decisive decision-making body in any organisation. And yet virtually no one looks forward to them or believes they work well.

Dysfunctional board packs and board meetings directly impact an organisation’s ability to create value. Board members get bogged down trying to understand the minutiae of operational matters and the discussion can tend towards micromanaging detail.

Too long and too cluttered, board packs can be hard to decipher and understand. Key messages are lost and strategic questions are buried. They often take so long to produce, that the board focuses on stale information.

Dr Sabine Dembkowski, Managing Partner of Better Boards analysed 600 conversations she had with board directors between 2018 and 2023. Amongst her key findings are:

• 85 per cent of director groups do not focus on the right things (they spend their time on operational matters or, in the case of Plc’s, administrative and governance matters).
• 80 per cent of boards do not talk openly about tricky, controversial issues.

Dembkowski believes there are three main problems with board reports:

1. They are too long with too much detail.
2. They lack well-crafted executive summaries to help set the tone and focus.
3. They don’t clarify what management needs from the board. What are the big questions? What decisions need to be made?

What is the solution?

The greatest sportspeople have time. They scan better, anticipate better. They make time to think.

Our board packs will help you to do just this. Digitally native. Grounded in theory and practically applied.

Use different reports for different purposes

We differentiate between monthly trading board packs and strategic quarterly board packs. Operational matters can be dealt with month-to-month and quarterly meetings are freed up for strategy:

• Monthly trading board packs are short. They contain charts, tables and little commentary. They are quick to produce so the board can work with fresh information at month-end. They provide a monthly snapshot of corporate health.
• Quarterly strategic packs are longer and contain commentary. They focus on strategy execution and the risks associated with hitting value creation plan milestones. They present the key issues and questions to focus on in the meeting.

See our blog post for more on the differences between these two board packs.

Write targeted and structured commentary

Words matter. The commentary in board packs has a direct impact on board room discussion.

We encourage the following:

• Take time to structure your thinking. Isolate the key points. What are the big questions that need to be answered? Remember the aim is to get to action.
• Limit your ideas as far as is practicable. Imagine you only have five minutes with the board. What is the one thing you need to get across to them? Ensure this comes across loud and clear. Aside from this, stick to the Rule of Three as far as you can, or Barbara Minto’s rule ‘the magic number seven, plus or minus two’.
• Write short, impactful sentences, using our QFOR-A method.
• We view commentary as data. We structure it, tag it and give it meaning. Is it a question, fact or opinion? Is it a recommendation or action? Or is it a quarterly highlight or lowlight? Know who wrote what, when and in what context. Track commentary for specific contexts over time. For example, list ‘CEO lowlights’ over time or the CFO’s statements on cash. Commentary tiles range from basic text tiles to dense tables, to lighter boxes or more dynamic Kanban views.

Make your reports easy on the eye

Our pages are put together using well-known digital and print design principles. They are uncluttered and easy to read.

• It’s common to use a traffic light system to display key metrics. We add a ‘B’ to RAG to create BRAG, where blue signifies overachievement. Using our Ārahi Arrow, we also show trend and volatility. Understand a metric versus target, as well as if it is trending up, down or is stable. Also, understand the volatility of that trend. This makes it easy to see which metrics might be leading indicators of key risks.
• Our chart legends use shape and colour. P&L items use circles. Balance sheets use crosses. A target is a dashed green line while an actual is a solid blue line (blue for true). A budget is a red dashed line. It’s red because it’s a promise signed in blood and dashed because it’s a type of target. A rolling number like LTM (last twelve months) uses a thicker line than a monthly number. This language becomes second nature. When you see something, the meaning is immediately obvious. Time is not wasted trying to decipher what’s in front of you.

None of this would be possible without data. We make data easy. We extract it from numerous sources and put it into our structured out-of-the-box data model. For more information, see our section on data.

• We aim for you to get what you need at a glance with print-polish elegance. We aim for all your data and commentary to be together in one integrated place. A single source of truth.
• We want you to fall in love with your board report for the first time. We want you to feel calmer, energised and excited. We want to help you feel more confident and courageous, with your head up, scanning and anticipating your next move.

Clear. Confident. In control.