How to Create an Engaging Financial Report For Your Business

Small businesses can’t ignore the role of a financial report in showcasing their performance and identifying growth opportunities.

When you create an engaging financial report, you can impress your clients and stakeholders and also attract new investors.

A well-crafted financial report gives the reader a comprehensive understanding of your company’s financial activities over a specific period, be it a month, quarter, or year. 

It goes without saying that a financial report is all about numbers pertaining to your budget, expenses, and profit collected from a financial data provider. 

The fact that these numbers are absolutely crucial for your business makes it necessary that you make every effort to ensure your audience understands their value. 

But many times, even the most impressive financial report may fail to engage your audience simply because they cannot relate to it. 

If you are a small business owner or a finance professional looking to create an engaging financial report, this post is for you. 

Let’s get rolling.

What is a Financial Report?

A financial report is a document that records all the financial activities of a business. 

The report is made to communicate the financial performance of a company during a specific period of time. 

Irrespective of the business type, you are legally obligated to generate a financial report to declare the financial status of your business. 

Some of the key objectives of creating an engaging financial report include:

• Track and monitor cash flow 
• Assess your business assets and liabilities
• Evaluate the equity of each shareholder 
• Quantify profit
• Propose calculated projections for the next year

A business may create an engaging financial report to achieve multiple goals. 

When this report is presented to investors, stakeholders, shareholders, and employees, you are informing them about your performance in the past year. 

The report also helps you understand how your business is charting its growth story. It also helps you understand its financial health. Using accounting software can help you simplify the process. 

Different Types of Financial Reports 

Let's take a quick look at the three popular types of financial reports that you must know as a business financial planner. 

1. Balance Sheet 

A balance sheet is a financial report which tracks the total assets, liabilities, and shareholder equities over a given period of time. 

Companies ideally create their balance sheets every quarter where the assets and liabilities of a company are analyzed.

The balance sheet is one of the most important documents investors refer to, so make sure you get them right.

2. Cash Flow Statement 

All the cash flow activities of your small business are recorded in a cash flow statement. It gives you a summary of the cash generated and the spent in a given time period. 

According to Younium, a careful study of the cash flow statement informs the readers about a company’s fund operations, investments, and other activities that are related to revenue generation. 

3. Income Statement 

An income statement is another type of financial report showcasing a company’s net income and loss along with revenue and expense management. 

This statement particularly focuses on the financial performance of a company, and that's why it is also called a P&L statement (profits and losses). 

Some of the important elements of an income statement include primary expenses, secondary expenses, operating revenue, and net and gross revenue. 

7 Proven Tips to Create an Engaging Financial Report

Now that you have a good understanding of financial reporting, let's take a look at the seven actionable tips to create an engaging financial report. 

Here you go. 

1. Tell a Story to Weave the Numbers 

Yes, your financial report is all about data and numbers. But to translate data into insights, you need to tell a story. 

To create an effective financial report, you have to weave a story around the data to successfully communicate your performance to your audience. 

For example, if you want to show that your revenue increased by 20% over the past 12 months, you can do so with the help of a graph or a chart. Within that chart, different segments can be created to depict the contribution of each department. 

You can then write a paragraph or two that explain the main insights that the audience can derive from this report.

2. Make the Financial Report Relatable to Your Audience 

Another way to create an engaging financial report is to make it relatable to your audience. When you’re creating and presenting your report, ask yourself, how can I make my audience connect to this report? 

The right approach to creating an engaging financial report is by presenting a summary of it. At the outset, give your audience the reason why they need to go through the report and what they’ll learn from it. 

While your board and key stakeholders may want an overview of financial goals achieved, your employees and shareholders may be more interested in quantifying the profit. On the other hand, your growth projection may get your potential investors excited about your small-town business idea. 

When you touch upon each of these aspects successfully, you’ll be able to create an engaging financial report for your small business. 

3. Enrich Your Reports with Visuals

 As imagery communicates better than words, one of the most effective ways to create an engaging financial report is by using visuals. 

Instead of listing down columns of numbers, you can innovatively represent them in the form of diagrams, graphs, or charts. To make more sense of the data, identify the key metrics for your business's financial performance and explain them through visuals. 

If you want to create an engaging financial report in digital format, you can consider including pictures and interactive financial charts. Here’s what an interactive chart created using Barchart looks like.

You can even think out of the box and make a video to present your financial report. This can help you communicate all important information in an engaging manner.

To personalize your report and bring cohesiveness, you should consider incorporating branding in your financial report in various ways. 

One of the easiest ways to create an engaging and branded financial report is to use your brand colors and logo throughout the report.

4. Create Clear Sections

I would like to emphasize the importance of making your report as organized as possible. 

Your financial report consists of various elements that are all intertwined. If you want your audience to understand what each of these elements means in relation to your business growth, the information needs to be well-segmented. 

Consider correlating different elements of the financial report by depicting them as ratios. 

For example, show the sales in a particular region in relation to a specific season. Similarly, you can create a section that’s dedicated to dividend payout and how they’ve grown over the years.

Creating such sections will help your audience understand multiple sections of your financial report in an easy way. And that's how you create an engaging financial report. 

5. Interpret Data to Provide Value

When you are striving to create an engaging financial report, your aim should be to make your audience understand the key metrics with ease. 

And to help your audience understand the metrics, you can add brief explanations and footnotes for each visual representation. 

As finance professionals, your responsibility is not only to present the data. But it’s to present that data in a way that your audience can understand without having to take too much trouble.

You can add more value to your financial report by identifying challenges like SaaS subscription billing scam, revenue leakage and suggesting solutions backed by data. 

This way, your report will not only serve the purpose of showing your current performance but will also be a financial planner that will contribute to your business’s growth plan. 

6. Invest in a Good Financial Reporting Tool 

Financial reporting is a meticulous and grueling task. 

Fortunately, we have top-quality financial reporting and management tools that can help you create an engaging report in a breeze. If you’re starting small, one of the effective options is Barchart for Excel. 

It's also a great idea to invest in an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution that can help you plan, budget, manage, report, and analyze your business’s financial activities. 

Cloud-based ERP systems can be quite useful in managing different aspects of your business. You can even consider a solution like Zoho Books accounting tool to create highly engaging financial reports.

What's more?

These tools offer customizable templates that can help you create your financial reports with a few clicks.

7. Keep Your Report Short and Crisp

Keeping your report short and crisp is the key to creating an engaging finance report for your small business. Experts call it the KISS rule, which stands for “keep it simple, stupid.”

But why should you do so?

Let's face it — your board, shareholders, clients, or potential investors do not have the time or patience to read through pages of data. So if you want to hack your business growth, you need to provide financial reports through which they can absorb the key takeaways from your report by reading a page or two.

So, if you want to create an engaging financial report, make it concise. Use loads of visuals and avoid using complex jargon to make it easy to understand. 

Are You Ready to Create an Engaging Financial Report for Your Business? 

Every business needs a financial report to understand where it stands. This report also comes in handy for showcasing your success to shareholders and potential investors. 

Apart from this your use latest QR code technology to provide quick and easy access of your financial report to your stakeholders to keep it more secure.

With out-of-the-box thinking and the adoption of technology, you can create an engaging financial report that can strike a chord with your audience and help you reach your business goals.

Go ahead and incorporate the tips I have shared above into your financial reporting and successfully create an impressive and professional report.