Strategic reporting helps companies answer questions about progress, performance, and results against specific objectives. It can include metrics, historical context, and future projections, and requires clear and explicit questions. Software programs can collect data and generate visual representations, while consulting firms can provide specialized assistance.
Strategic reporting allows companies to answer questions regarding progress, results and performance against specific objectives. These reports can use a variety of tools to gather information about a business or organization to answer these questions completely and accurately. They may be used for internal business and public liability in the case of government agencies and publicly traded companies. Software utilities are available to facilitate the preparation of strategic reports, as are consulting firms that specialize in this topic.
Like other business reports, strategy reports can include a discussion of common metrics such as expenses, revenues, and growth. The report may discuss new acquisitions, the performance of individual business units, and similar topics. It can also provide historical context and future projections, looking at past performance and predicting future results. Additionally, this process may include surveys and reviews conducted by members of the reporting team or a neutral third party.
This approach to corporate or agency reporting requires asking questions that can be answered through reporting. Questions should be clear, detailed and explicit. They can refer to objectives previously determined by the organization. For example, instead of asking “how well is the company doing?”, people might consider questions like “how much market share do we have?” or “what is our most productive department”. For government agencies, the process may include a discussion of whether the agency is fulfilling a mandate such as improving food safety or protecting consumers.
Business plans may require periodic strategic reports. They can also provide information that companies can use in preparing their reports, such as mission statements and factual questions to use as input in audit documents. Previous reports are available for comparison purposes. These can help preparers stay on track with their reporting projects or acknowledge changing business goals that require changes to reporting policies.
Strategic reporting software programs can bring together objective data such as sales numbers, expenses, and other financial statements. They may also collect survey results, interview transcripts, and other materials for your benefit. Graphs, charts, and other visual representations of progress can be automatically generated, allowing a business to illustrate percentage growth and other topics. Such programs can also create templates for use in future strategy reports and can offer prompts and worksheets to help users generate comprehensive and effective reports by guiding them through the process from start to finish.
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