How to Write Great Annual Reports
Annual reports are a particularly important part of your business because they allow you to take stock of the previous year's performance. These annual reports can also be critical to bringing in much-needed venture capital dollars. A well-written report reflects positively on the work that you do, inspiring confidence in your investors. No matter the state of the economy, you need to gain whatever advantage you can over your competitors, and a great annual report could be the tool you need to put you ahead of your rivals.
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Instructions
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Research what happened with the company in the previous year. Yes, you probably already have a great understanding of this information. By poring over the financial reports and revisiting customer feedback, however, you'll have sample prose to borrow and include in your document.
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Decide upon an overriding theme for your annual report. Stelzner Consulting advises doing so, and it demonstrates a high level of professionalism. For example, an annual report for Peregrine Systems was to be easy to read while also visually appealing, and its writers intended it to communicate the company's excitement with the previous year's accomplishments. Having a theme will also help you with the many choices you'll have to make as you write your annual report. If you're going for a trendy tone, for example, you'll choose a lot of exciting, modern-sounding words.
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Divide your annual report into sections that will make it easy to digest the information within. This will allow the reader to find what they're looking for very quickly. These sections should have clear titles and should be listed in a table of contents. An annual report for Australia's Seaford 6-12 School listed their actions in "lifelong learning" first, helping to indicate to the reader what mattered most to them.
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End your annual report with an appendix in which you list all of the unedited data you couldn't fit elsewhere. While you probably shouldn't exhaustively list each of your profit/loss figures for the past ten years, including this information in an appendix will allow the extremely curious to satisfy their need for cold, hard numbers.
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Proofread your annual report several times on several days and allow as much time as you can for post-production. In the heat of composition, it's easy for you or your employees to make simple errors. Unfortunately, those errors reflect poorly on your business if the reader notices them. (For some reason, small mistakes are always noticed by the people you wish would overlook them.)
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- Photo Credit business report image by Christopher Hall from Fotolia.com
