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10 Slide Ideas for Financial Report Presentation

Last Updated on February 7, 2024 by Anastasia

Working on a company financial report, and want to make it different this time? Financial reviews full of data and analysis are typically difficult to be digested by non-financial audiences, and it can be challenging to communicate the meaning behind the figures. If you want to disclose your quarterly or annual numbers in a simple and understandable way to your key stakeholders, check our blog for examples and inspiration.

A financial report is a management tool used to communicate key financial information to both internal and external stakeholders by covering aspects of financial affairs with the help of KPIs, such as income statements, balance sheets, cash flow, or financial ratios analysis. See how to prepare structured and professional financial slides smoothly using PowerPoint tools.

All graphics examples presented below can be downloaded as an editable source. Explore the Financial Report and Performance Indicators Presentation for PowerPoint.

Get inspired by seven examples of how you can illustrate the components of your financial report and a quick instruction on how you can create a P&L Statement table using simple design tricks.

Visualize your key financial indicators

Such a general slide with a financial summary will help to analyze the big picture and ensure you’re on the same page with the audience.

You can list the common key indicators such as Global Net Revenue, Like for Like Growth, Cash Conversion Cycle, Profit Before Tax. A neutral background picture makes the slide more attractive and circles with highlights on the right help to stay focused on important numbers.

Show revenue and profit snapshot on one dashboard slide

This slide shows how you can summarize net sales and profitability evolution using gauges and a simple bar chart. The dashboard illustrates typical profitability measures: Net Sales, Operating Expenses, EBIDTA, and PBT as easy-to-read gauge charts. The profit growth over the years is shown as a clear bar chart.

Illustrate revenue highlights with clear charts

If you’d like to include additional data, for example, revenue highlights over time or regions, you can do it as on the slides above. The first one presents sales distribution breakdown by months and categories. The second slide example presents sales split by worldwide markets geographies on a world map as light background underlining the location of the markets.

Small elements, like pin icons, doughnut charts, and color-coding will help you add a professional look to your presentation.

Pro tip: To help non-financial people digest the data, keep your slides short, don’t stuff them with jargon words . Use illustrations, and make the most essential data points clearly visible.

Include balance sheet and cash flow tables

The very common problem is the unreadability of massive tables. The balance sheet and cash flow statement will be definitely complex, as you need to squeeze many numbers inside.

Notice how color-coding is used for various table sections, and illustrative symbols, which don’t steal attention from the content, rather nicely add up. A text box aside can be used for your comments or notes.

Compare key drivers of a revenue growth

To illustrate the comparison of several growth drivers, you can apply such stacked bars.

Notice how specific drivers (E-commerce, Emerging Markets, Organic Growth, New Product Lines) are illustrated by corresponding icon symbols, all in one consistent style.

Visualize revenue analysis for each quarter in your financial report

To present an analysis of sales revenue over the year, you can use such a bar chart. It’s slightly enhanced by adding quarter signs over the data chart.

This data chart illustrates revenue analysis split by quarters and channels. If you have some comments or notes you’d like to discuss, we advise putting the most essential point in bold.

Present your financial metrics and indicators as a dashboard grid

Want to go deeper and include the analysis of some ratios? A good idea is to firstly remind your audience what are those indicators and what exactly they show.

If you have more items to show on one slide, it’s good to organize them to some regular grid. Make sure all elements are aligned to make it look professional.

If you have more items to show on one slide, it’s good to organize them to some regular grid.

You can include general definitions and development of key financial ratios e.g. growth, profitability, liquidity, efficiency, solvency, and capital market ratios. On the slide example, you can see the capital market ratios KPI line chart which shows Dividend Yield and P/E Ratio change over the years.

Guide on how to redesign P&L Statement to a stylish table

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how you can create a P&L Statement table using simple shapes, icons, and a few tricks that will save you time.

1. Use simple PowerPoint shapes to create a stylish table design.

2. Adjust your source P&L table to be readable.

The trick is to have enough margin inside the table cell.

3. Enhance the table header

Add ribbon shapes as an additional header row to make the table look nicer.

4. Redesign the first column

You can add stylish arrows in a place of 1st table column.

5. Enrich your table with icons and a background picture.

See the whole instruction and other visual examples here: How to Create an Effective Company Financial Report Using PowerPoint.

Need to prepare a broader annual report and focus on business highlights? See how to create a comprehensive overview of activities using graphs, icons, infographic elements, and data-driven charts in this blog .

Resource: Financial Report and Performance Indicators Presentation

The graphics in this blog are a part of our financial report layouts collection. Our financial review deck incorporates 30 infographics slide templates for a financial summary overview, balance sheets with assets and liabilities, income statement, profit and loss reports, revenue and profit snapshot, cash flow statement, explain types of financial ratios, key growth drivers, or breakdown of your operational expenses.

You can reuse graphs and charts, and tailor them to your needs in order to make your slides clear and easy to understand. See the full deck here:

Financial Report and Performance Indicators PPT Presentation

Using concise, modern images will make your PowerPoint structured and consistent. To make your presentations even more appealing, consider also using this collection of professionally designed diagram layouts .

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Blog Data Visualization

15 Financial Report Examples to Communicate Financial Data

By Danesh Ramuthi , Oct 26, 2023

A financial report offers an in-depth view of a company’s financial status over a specific period, encompassing crucial documents like the balance sheet, income statement and the statement of cash flows. 

Such reports provide a clear lens into a company’s operations, enabling stakeholders, financial analysts and investors to evaluate both short term and long term assets and liabilities, net income and the overall financial health.

From the intricacies of accounts receivable and payable to the clarity provided by the statement of cash flow reconciles, financial reports are indispensable.

Furthermore, they reflect a company’s performance, detailing sales revenue, operating expenses and even non-operating revenue. These documents are governed by international financial reporting standards and generally accepted accounting principles, ensuring accuracy and transparency

Dive into our curated collection of 15 financial report examples that elucidate the art of communicating intricate financial data. 

And if you’re seeking an intuitive tool to craft your own financial reports, check out Vennagge’s report maker and access a range of tailored financial report templates . 

Click to jump ahead:

• 15 Financial report examples

How to write a financial report?

What is the difference between financial reports and financial statements, 15 financial report examples to communicate financial data.

Financial reports play a pivotal role in communicating a company’s financial position, performance and projections to its stakeholders. Let’s explore a few types of financial report examples and a comprehensive view of its components and significance.

Annual financial report

The annual financial report is like a yearly check-up for a company’s money. It starts with the company’s mission and vision, which tell us what the company wants to do and where it hopes to go. 

Next, there’s a financial overview that includes important things like the profit, income, budget, expenses, net income and revenue. 

Beyond the numbers, the year’s milestones, challenges and achievements come alive in this section. 

Be it a record-breaking sales figure, expansion into new markets or innovative product launches, the highlights offer a narrative, bridging financial data with the company’s operational journey. 

Financial analysts often look at this section to gauge the company’s performance against its mission and vision, assessing its trajectory for future growth.

Monthly financial report

Monthly financial reports play a pivotal role in the financial management and oversight of any business.

These concise yet comprehensive documents capture the essence of a company’s financial activities over a month, providing valuable insights into revenue streams, expenses incurred and overall profitability.

Tracking these monthly figures allows businesses to swiftly identify trends, pinpoint areas of concern and react to any short-term challenges before they escalate.

The timely nature of these reports means that any deviations from projected performance can be quickly addressed, ensuring that the business remains on a path of sustained growth. 

Furthermore, by offering a detailed breakdown of aspects like sales revenue, operating expenses and potential liabilities, these reports empower businesses to make data-driven decisions, optimize cash flow and fortify their financial health in the competitive marketplace.

Income statement financial report

The income statement, commonly referred to as the profit and loss statement, is one of the three paramount financial statements used by businesses to showcase their financial performance over an accounting period. 

While the balance sheet provides a snapshot of assets and liabilities and the cash flow statement details cash movements, the income statement zooms in on the company’s revenues, expenses, and overall profitability.

It illuminates crucial aspects like operating expenses, sales revenue and net income, offering insights into the company’s operations and its relative standing in the industry. 

By deciphering the data within an income statement, companies can identify areas of efficiency, detect underperforming sectors and align their strategies to ensure optimal financial performance.

Statement of cash flows financial report

A cash flow statement stands as a crucial pillar in a company’s financial reports, detailing the movement of money within the business. 

It captures all cash inflows, from everyday operations to external investment sources, and all outflows, including those that cover various business activities and investments. 

By examining this statement, one can understand if a company is generating enough cash from its operations or relying on external financing. 

Moreover, it helps in ascertaining how a company is managing its cash resources, providing insights into its financial health and operational efficiency.

Statement of change in equity financial report

The statement of change in equity delves deep into the shifts in a company’s equity over a defined accounting period. Commonly known as the statement of retained earnings, this document offers insights into the financial decisions that impact shareholder value. 

It encompasses elements like net profits or losses and the distribution of dividends. By analyzing this statement, stakeholders can grasp how well the company is doing in terms of increasing its retained earnings and thus, enhancing its overall financial health. 

This report plays a vital role in deciphering the company’s commitment to its shareholders, reflecting on its strategic financial decisions.

Summary financial report

A summary financial report can be visualized as a bird’s-eye view of a company’s financial terrain. Unlike exhaustive reports that delve deep into the numbers, this summary highlights the key aspects: revenue, expenses, cash flow, assets, liabilities and equity. 

It’s a tool that encapsulates the company’s financial story, helping investors and stakeholders quickly gauge the business’s fiscal position. 

Whether released quarterly or annually, this summary serves as a preliminary tool for deeper financial exploration, offering a concise yet informative glimpse into the company’s financial trajectory.

Analysis financial report

Financial reports are crucial documents that provide detailed insights into a company’s financial health and performance. At the heart of this analysis is the income statement, which offers a breakdown of a company’s sales revenue, operating expenses and net income over a specific accounting period. 

Another essential element in the analysis is the balance sheet. This statement provides a snapshot of the company’s assets, liabilities and shareholders’ equity at a particular point in time. 

By comparing the company’s assets to its liabilities, one can gauge its financial stability and solvency. Additionally, elements like retained earnings give an insight into the company’s reinvestment strategies or dividend payments to shareholders. 

One should not forget the importance of financial ratios derived from these reports, such as the earnings per share (EPS), which can influence the company’s stock price. 

By following generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) or international financial reporting standards (IFRS), companies ensure that their financial reporting examples are consistent and transparent.

Business financial report

A business financial report serves as a compass, indicating the fiscal direction and health of a company over a specified duration.

The linchpin of this report is the income statement, which paints a vivid picture of the company’s earnings landscape by detailing its total sales revenue and segregating operating from non-operating revenue.

It also shines a light on the net income or loss for the period under scrutiny. 

Another critical component of the business financial report is the balance sheet. This offers a consolidated view of the company’s assets, liabilities, and shareholder equity. 

The balance between assets and liabilities gives stakeholders a clear picture of the company’s financial stability and its ability to meet short-term and long-term debt obligations. 

For instance, accounts receivables might indicate the company’s efficiency in collecting dues, while accounts payable can provide insights into the company’s management of its debts. To supplement these, the cash flow statements show how the company manages its cash from operations, investments and financing. 

When combined, these financial documents create a holistic view of a business’s financial health, guiding decisions related to investment banking, marketable securities, and other financial accounts.

Budget financial report

A budget financial report is a forward-looking document that provides an organized and detailed plan for a company’s financial activities for a specific period. This type of report typically includes projected income statements and expected cash flow statements. 

One primary purpose of such a report is to set financial targets for the upcoming reporting period, be it short-term or long-term. By comparing these forecasts with actual financial data as the period progresses, companies can gauge their financial performance and make necessary adjustments to their business operations.

Budgeting plays a pivotal role in financial planning. This report delineates where a company expects its revenue to come from, be it sales revenue, operating revenue or non-operating revenue, and how it plans to spend it.

On the expenditure side, the budget might break down operating expenses, dividend payments, investment in marketable securities and more.

Additionally, this report will often account for both current assets and liabilities and long-term assets and debts. 

By analyzing the budgeted financial statements against the actual financial statements, stakeholders can understand the company’s financial position, its capacity for future growth and its overall business’s financial health. 

Moreover, the budget financial report aids in strategizing investment activities, financing activities and managing the company’s operations effectively, ensuring that the company remains on track to achieve its financial objectives.

Financial reports are instrumental in illustrating a company’s financial position and performance over a specific period. They serve as a roadmap for stakeholders, guiding business decisions and investments.

Crafting an insightful financial report involves a structured approach, detailing various financial activities and metrics.

Step 1: Offer a company overview

Begin by providing an overview of your company. This section should shed light on the company’s operations, market position and business objectives.

Ensure that the company’s financial health and major business operations are highlighted, offering readers a foundation upon which they can base the forthcoming financial data.

Step 2: Delve into sales projections and key financial aspects

Detail your company’s sales forecast, illuminating expected sales revenue and any factors influencing these projections. Additionally, delve into other crucial sections like financial targets, operating revenue and any non-operating revenue.

This offers stakeholders a bird’s-eye view of the company’s expected financial performance for the reporting period.

Step 3: Ascertain the company’s value

Incorporate a section dedicated to the company’s valuation. This should encapsulate assets and liabilities, shareholders equity and any long-term or short-term debt. The company’s valuation is pivotal for investors and financial analysts to ascertain the company’s worth and its potential for future growth.

Step 4: Add the summaries of key financial statements

A comprehensive financial report encompasses summaries of vital financial statements. Furnish a brief overview of the company’s income statement, balance sheet and cash flow statement. 

These statements provide insights into the company’s net income, assets liabilities, cash flows and the overall financial health. By adhering to international financial reporting standards or generally accepted accounting principles, you ensure transparency and consistency in financial reporting.

Step 5: Finish with the summary of the entire report

Conclude the report by summarizing your findings. This section should encapsulate your final views about the company’s financial position, performance and potential. Share opinions on whether the company is poised for profit or might incur a loss. 

Consider weaving in financial ratios or any other important financial statements that can bolster your claims. A succinct summary aids stakeholders in quickly grasping the crux of the financial report, influencing their decisions about the company’s prospects.

Related: 20 Professional Report Cover Page Examples & Templates [100% Customizable]

While both financial reports and financial statements serve as pivotal tools in illustrating a business’s financial health, they each have distinct roles and attributes.

At their core, financial statements are essentially a subset within the broader scope of financial reports. Below are the primary contrasts between these two financial tools:

Scope of the report & statement

A financial statement, such as an income statement or a cash flow statement, zooms in on a specific financial aspect. In contrast, a financial report is an amalgamation of multiple related financial details, often encompassing several statements. 

Formatting of the report & statement

Precision in presentation is important for financial statements like the balance sheet. They adhere to set standards, categorizing assets, liabilities and owner’s equity into clear segments with aggregated values for each segment. 

Financial reports, while encapsulating this data, enjoy more flexibility in their presentation format, allowing for variations that might not be possible in individual financial statements.

Length of the report & statement

Given its comprehensive nature, a financial report is typically more voluminous than a single financial statement. 

It paints a holistic picture of a company’s financial terrain, necessitating the inclusion of diverse financial metrics and analyses. 

On the other hand, a financial statement is a concise document focusing on a singular financial facet. 

From assessing an organization’s overall financial health annually to understanding monthly financial fluctuations, the variety of financial report examples underscores the importance of thorough and diverse financial reporting. 

These reports, ranging from the granular focus of income statements to the broader analysis found in summary and business reports, offer stakeholders, both internal and external, a clear window into an entity’s financial position and performance. 

Mastering the nuances of each type can significantly enhance financial transparency and decision-making.

If you’re looking to craft insightful financial reports, tools like Venngage report maker can make the process seamless. Their extensive range of financial report templates ensures you have the perfect layout and design for every financial insight you wish to share.

Home Blog PowerPoint Tutorials How To Create a PowerPoint Presentation of Financial Statements

How To Create a PowerPoint Presentation of Financial Statements

At SlideModel.com we receive several help requests from our users regarding Financial Analysis PowerPoint Presentations, mainly the presentation of Financial Statements data. We have previously wrote about this topic in our post  Financial Statement Templates For PowerPoint Presentations  with the objective to help users summarize relevant data and communicate the important conclusion extracted from the statements. The feedback was positive, but we are still requested to provide some guidelines on detailed statements. For this reason we will walk through our   Financial Statements PowerPoint Template  which provides comprehensive tables that provide higher level of detail. In order to have a higher visual impact and allow the message to engage the audience, the template also provides charts and ratios dashboards that will appeal to executive audiences.

• Financial data is complex
• Concepts are not intuitive
• The understanding and frame of references varies depending the audience.

This facts will drive your consolidated financial statements presentation plan.

The following sections will walk through financial statement presentation examples and will provide insights on how to tackle them.

Balance Sheet

The balance sheet by definition is a financial statement that summarizes an organization assets, liabilities and equity at a specific point of time (a snapshot). This three concepts provide information on what the organization owns, owes and how much was invested (capital).  Applying the facts we described before, Balance Sheet data is complex, so you will try to summarize the data in each section as much as possible, presenting the relevant accounting lines (generally, those associated with Liquidity , Debt and Net Worth ). The Concepts ( Assets , Liabilities and Equity ) are not simple, and when you dive into “liquidity of them”, it starts getting harder. The audience will drive your level of detail, so present a table where the major concepts are clearly highlighted (background colors), with totalizers (use bold for this lines and make sure you point them strongly). Move quickly to the Ratios section if understood, otherwise navigate to a second level of detail, if the audience requests to drill down.

As shown by the orange arrows in the image, the important concepts are highlighted. Again, what will remain in the audience mind is that “you can explain detail if requested”, “you can show the consolidated numbers” and that “you can move to the important topics derived in the relationships of Financial Statements”, the Ratios .

Income Statement

The Income Statement, also known as  “Statement of Incomes” , “Profit & Loss” or just “P&L”, is a financial statement that presents financial performance of an organization over a time period. How does it measures performance ? , summarizing how revenues occur and how expenses were incurred for all the organization activities (operational and non-operational). Also , shows the Net Profit (positive or negative) over the period.

This statement if divided into two sections, operational and non-operational. Operational items are directly related with the organizations core activities in Sales and Cost of Sale. Non Operational Items are expenses the company incurs for administrative , managerial or assets exchange activities.

Differently from the Balance Sheet, the Income Statement represents a period of time and not a snapshot.

When creating an Income Statement Presentation, take into account that what the audience is looking for is How the organization is performing?.  Generally, to show performance, you will need to compare against other period or a benchmark, for that reason each column is a “challenger” for the actual period column. Even though the absolute numbers are important you will need to communicate  the Trend concluded against the original and challengers statements. Highlight the Revenues and the Cost of Sales . Present them in an individual Slide as the “ Operational ” Section of the statement.

The second section of the Income Statement , is the Non-Operational Items, generally called “expenses”. This section shows how the organization management is using money for non operational activities. This section is important when the analysis is centered in improving efficiency. The amount of non-operational items can be huge, so its important you can consolidate into categories. Take your time to exercise this suggestion, otherwise the list will be too long, and will dis-encourage the audience. As a suggestion, keep in mind that this line items are industry dependent. Analyze some examples in your industry to come up with meaningful consolidated categories.

Statement Of Cash Flows

The Statement Of Cash Flows, by definition, is the financial statement that presents all the cash inflows and outflows derived of the operating, financing and investing activities of the organization in a period of time. This financial statement is created by 2 widely used methods, the direct and indirect methods. The main difference is that the direct method uses cashflow records to create the operational items while the indirect method uses  accrual accounting information to present the cash flows from the operations section, deriving them from the net income .Considering that the indirect method is the most popular, we included its table in the template.

This statement must communicate the cash flows through the organization activities and their accounting recognitions. The analysis generally will focus on the sustainability of the operational section, and how much investment and financing is required at the period to keep the business going. If contracts are being recognized as revenue in a period but money is not really reaching the organization, the statement of cashflows will spot this problem and will help managers to take actions over it. With the same reasoning, if net income allows higher cash flow bandwidth in operations, the organization could use fund for repaying debt and diminish the cost of financing.

The Statement of Cash Flows is divided in the three sections mentioned, Operational , Financing and Investing activities. In this template we created one slide for Operations and Finance, a second slide for Investing and a third slide with the subtotals of each activity, showing the total cash flows.

Presenting Trends

As we mentioned before, the important message that need to be presented with the financial statement  is the organizations performance. The best tools for communicating trends, are the charts. In this case the Financial Statements PowerPoint Template Provides three editable examples. We will show how the presenter can edit the charts and present meaningful information derived from the statements.

Income and Expenses Barchart

When reviewing the Income Statement , we explained the importance of the Operational Data versus Non-Operational . The Income and Expenses Chart visually communicate the relationship between this activities and allows the audience to review the trend or evolution, period versus period. This is ideal for spoting efficiency opportunities. The chart has two veritcal axis. The left (or main) axis represents the Operational Income and Net Income. The right axis (or secondary Axis) represents the Sales, Cost of Sales and Expenses. Remember the simple algebra that relates this value:

• Operational Income = Sales – Cost of Sales
• Net Income = Sales – Cost of Sales – Expenses

This example shows that the Net Income increases with time at a higher rate than the operational income. This can be interpreted as that sales improved, and expenses were kept almost similar. This kind of information is the message the presenter need to communicate, and the use of chart will boost the audience retention of the idea.

The chart is created as a PowerPoint chart, so the user will be able to edit it though the “ Edit Data ” Option of the “ Chart Tools > Design ” menu.

Income and Expenses Pie Chart

The other Chart Tool included in the Financial Statement PowerPoint Template is the Discrimination in Revenues and Expenses. This Charts help to transmit the message of revenues streams and expenses items. Ideal to communicate which are the business lines that bring higher revenues to the organization and which are the items were most of the money is being spent. Again, this chart will allow to spot efficiency problems, prioritize business units or cut costs.

Operating Income & Margin

One of the most extensively used key performance indicators in financial statement is the Operating Margin. This indicator derived from the operating revenues and operating costs allows to compare efficiency on the performance of the value proposition delivery. The trends over the operating margin can show problems in costs or problems on value proposition delivery that derive in a lower return. Again, in the sake of providing comparable features, the chart presented uses two vertical axis (primary and secondary). The primary axis (left) represents the Operating Income. The secondary axis (right) represents the Operating Margin. The chart is Data Driven, and editable through Excel.

Financial Statement Ratios

In this section we will show the most popular ratios used in conjunction with the Financial Statements. Following the initial note idea, the aim of the financial statements presentation should not be to repeat numbers and lists, but to communicate conclusions of the information hidden behind them . With this objective in mind is that executives decided to move into ratio analysis instead of financial statements analysis, basically because a summarized indicator ( KPI ) that relates specific data, provides enough information for decision making process, without the need of extensive analysis.

Liquidity Ratios

The liquidity ratios,by definition, are key performance indicators of the organization  to determine  it’s ability to pay off its short-terms debts obligations. They are created with information derived from the Balance Sheet (so they represent a snapshot). In the Financial Statement PowerPoint Template we created gauges indicators with categories from Best to Worse. The presentar can edit and manipulate this shapes as the are 100% fully editable . The indicators selected are:

• Current Ratio : also known as Working Capital Position.
• Quick Ratio : also known as Acid Test Ratio
• Net Working Capital Ratio

Profitability Ratios

Organizations Financial Performance can be interpreted from different angles, some times, growth is more importante than being “more” profitable, but almost all the times executives need to compare profitability between periods, to understand the impact of strategic decisions over the amount of money left for the organization and stakeholders.

For this ratios we prepared an alternative Gauge design,  modern and without classification over the values.

The ratios presented are:

• Return on Assets (ROA)
• Return on Equity (ROE)
• Profit Margin

Capital Structure Ratios

The Capital Structure  is how an organization finances its overall operations and growth by using different sources of funds. The Ratios on this sections allows the presenter to communicate this relationships. In this case instead of gauge like indicators, we used Editable Donut Charts.

• Assets Turnover Ratio
• Accounts Receivable Turnover Ratio
• Inventories Turnover Ratio

Debt Equity Ratios

The debt equity ratios show how the organization uses debt and equity to finace assets and operations.

• Debt to Equity Ratio
• Interest Coverage Ratio

Creating Consolidated Financial Statements PowerPoint Presentations can be a tough job. The presenter needs to evaluate the complexity of the data, the depth to be shown and the audience that will assist the presentation. Tools like charts and dashboard will help the presenter to summarize relevant information and communicate quicker, the important facts. The use of Financial Ratios is fundamental for a successful message.

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Balance, Cash Flow, Dashboard, Financial, Gauge, Income, Ratios, Sheet, Statement, Tables Filed under PowerPoint Tutorials

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Example Presentation Of Financial Reports Powerpoint Presentation Slides

If you are looking to represent your financial statements, then use our example presentation of financial reports PowerPoint presentation slides. Incorporate this financial statement analysis presentation template to provide a detailed financial detail about your company to your business creditors, investors and analysts which will help them to know about the financial position of the business stability. This financial results PPT template will further result in taking the effective business decisions in accordance to your company’s prevailing position in the competitive market. Utilize this financial report of a company PowerPoint slide as a device which directs your administration to have a control on different business errands. Our financial statement example PowerPoint design is crafted by our group of professional experts for your business development. Thus, showcase your financial record with this interesting PPT layout. Place a bet on our Example Presentation Of Financial Reports Powerpoint Presentation Slides. They will come up trumps everytime.

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35+ Best Finance PowerPoint PPT Templates (Financial Presentations)

Big numbers and data play an important role in every financial PowerPoint presentation. It’s how you validate and prove your claims.

But the way you present the data in your PowerPoint slides is the key to delivering a successful presentation.

Whether it’s a pitch deck for a financial project, a yearly financial report, or promoting a finance consulting firm, your presentation slides need to be designed in a way that makes your statements and data easy to understand.

Of course, not everyone has the time or the experience to design over-the-top presentations. And thanks to pre-made PowerPoint templates, you don’t have to.

We handpicked a collection of financial PowerPoint presentation examples that you can use to find inspiration for your slideshow designs. The best part is you can download these templates to make amazing finance presentations within minutes. Have a look.

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Business PPT Templates

Corporate & pro.

Ciri Template

Modern PPT Templates

New & innovative.

Mystify Presentation

Pitch PowerPoint

Explore PowerPoint Templates

Investor – Financial Consulting PowerPoint Template

This PowerPoint template is designed with financial consulting firms and agencies in mind. It’s perfect for making presentations for showcasing your business as well as for promoting your services. The template includes 30 unique slide layouts with useful designs including pricing tables, charts, editable graphics, and more.

Financial Pitch – PowerPoint Presentation Template

If you’re working on a pitch deck design for presenting a financial project, you can take inspiration from this PowerPoint template. It includes 30 must-have slides for every pitch deck presentation. And you can easily download and customize each slide to make your own pitch decks as well.

Financy – Financial PowerPoint Template

Financy is a multipurpose PowerPoint template that you can use for all kinds of finance-related presentations. It includes 40 unique slides with flexible designs. You can edit them to make unique layouts for financial reports, agency portfolios, business profiles, and much more. You’ll also find editable graphics, device mockups, and charts for making your presentations more convincing.

Investment & Financial Consulting PowerPoint Template

Making slides with a clean and minimal design makes it easier to give more attention to the text, quotes, and data in a presentation. This PowerPoint template is designed with that goal in mind. It features 32 different slides with clean designs. The slides also include editable graphics, image placeholders, and more.

Dashi – Financial Dashboard PowerPoint Template

If you want to create financial dashboard slides to showcase data and statistics in visual form, this template will come in handy. Dashi is a PowerPoint template that features a collection of financial dashboard layouts. Each slide in the template has fully customizable charts and graphs for showcasing data with attractive designs.

Sales Planning – Free Finance PowerPoint Template

This is a free PowerPoint template you can use to create presentations related to the sales planning process. It gives you 35 different slides to choose from to create powerful and effective presentations. It also features charts, graphs, and infographics as well.

Financo – Financial Technology PowerPoint Template

Financo is a modern PowerPoint template you can use to craft presentations related to finance and technology. It comes with 25 different slides with colorful and highly visual designs. You can easily edit them to change colors, fonts, and images too.

Finance Company PowerPoint Template

This PowerPoint template is made for financial companies. It has 20 unique slides you can use to make various types of presentations for financial reports and monthly meetings. The template has master slides and image placeholders as well.

Fintech Finance PowerPoint Template

You can use this PowerPoint template to design presentations for fintech startups and businesses. There are 40 different slides in this template that come in both light and dark color themes. They include editable graphics and changeable colors.

Coins – Finance PowerPoint Template

This PowerPoint template includes a set of professional slides that are ideal for making corporate finance presentations. It has 30 different slides that have modern and simple designs. The slides are available in 3 different color themes and in light and dark versions.

Financial Meeting Free PowerPoint Template

This is a free PowerPoint template you can use to create attractive presentations for your financial meetings. There are 20 slides included in this template and it comes in Google Slides format too.

Fintech – Payment Finance PowerPoint Template

Just as the title suggests, this PowerPoint template is made with fintech startups and businesses in mind. It has a modern and attractive design you can leverage to create attention-grabbing slideshows to talk about finance tech topics.

Investment – Finance PowerPoint Template

This PowerPoint template has the perfect design for making presentations for investment-related topics. There are 30 unique slides in this template with fully editable layouts, changeable colors, image placeholders, and more.

PerfectPitch – Investor Pitch Deck Powerpoint Template

The colorful design and its sleek layouts make this PowerPoint template a great choice for creating pitch decks for finance-related projects. It includes 40 unique slides with editable graphics and free fonts.

Finova – Financial & Business PowerPoint Template

A bold and professional PowerPoint template for creating business and finance presentations. This template comes with more than 27 unique slides with master slides, free icons, and editable graphics.

Tax Agency – Free Finance PowerPoint Template

Download this PowerPoint template for free to create slideshows for all kinds of tax-related presentations. It includes 21 different slides with colorful designs and an icon pack with 500 icons.

Financial & Data Consulting Free PowerPoint Template

This PowerPoint template includes a complete toolkit for creating presentations for financial consulting firms. In addition to its unique style of slide design, this template comes with a total of 51 slides full of editable graphics and icons.

Finance Pitch Deck PowerPoint Template

Another minimal and clean PowerPoint template for designing effective pitch presentations. This template is ideal for presenting your ideas and financial plans in an attractive way. You can choose from 30 different slide layouts to create various types of financial pitch presentations.

Finzo – Finance PowerPoint Presentation

Finzo is a PowerPoint template for making company profiles and portfolio presentations. And it’s specially designed for finance-related businesses. The template has 30 slides with fully customizable layouts, editable graphics, image placeholders, as well as master slide layouts.

Alaza – Financial PowerPoint Templates

This PowerPoint template comes with a creative layout that allows you to make presentations for financial consulting firms and agencies. It includes a total of 40 slide designs with editable colors, vector icons, device mockups, master slides, and vector graphics. You can also change the images and fonts to your preference as well.

Apollo – Modern Finance PowerPoint Template

Apollo is another colorful finance PowerPoint template that comes with slides full of gradient colors. The creative and colorful design of these slides will surely help make your presentations stand out from the crowd. It includes 40 slides with fully customizable layouts as well as editable graphics, image placeholders, and more.

Profit & Loss – Finance PowerPoint Infographics Slides

This slides template pack is a must-have for showcasing your data in visual form. It includes 33 different infographic slides you can use to create charts and graphs for presenting statistics on profits and losses. Each slide is available in 12 different color schemes and you can also change colors and text with just a few clicks.

Microfinance – Free Financial PowerPoint Template

Just as the name suggests, this free PowerPoint template is designed with microfinance presentations in mind. It includes 12 different slide layouts that you can easily customize to create your own beautiful presentations.

Finance & Investment – Free PowerPoint Template

With 25 different slides to choose from, this free PowerPoint template includes everything you need to design an effective presentation for your financial meetings and events. Each slide can be easily customized to your preference as well.

Financial Report PowerPoint Presentation Template

Creating financial reports usually involves lots of diagrams, pie charts, and timelines. The good news is this PowerPoint template has them all and more for creating effective financial report presentations. It includes a total of 130 slide designs that are available in 50 different XML color themes, as well as light and dark designs.

Finanza – Finance PowerPoint Template

This PowerPoint template is perfect for making company profile presentations for showcasing your financial consultancy firms, agencies, and businesses. It lets you choose from 45 different slide layouts that include changeable colors, editable vector graphics, image placeholders, and more.

Fund Investing Finance PowerPoint Template

If you’re working on a PowerPoint slideshow to present the financial data related to investing or funding rounds, this template is made just for you. It features lots of highly visual and colorful slides for showcasing stats and data in creative ways. There are 65 different slide designs included in this template.

FINCASH – Finance & Consulting PowerPoint Template

Fincash is a PowerPoint template made with modern finance consulting firms in mind. It features a set of beautiful slide layouts with professional layouts. There are lots of charts, graphs, and infographics for visualizing data. You can also choose from more than 60 different slides to create unique presentations.

Finance Infographics PowerPoint Template

Looking for clean and professional infographic templates for showcasing your data in visual form? Then be sure to download this PowerPoint template. It comes with a total of 60 infographic slides with charts and timelines for presenting your data in different ways. Each slide is available in light and dark color themes and they can be easily customized to your preference.

Investment Business Free Financial PowerPoint Template

This free PowerPoint template uses a simple and minimal design for making financial and investment presentations. It includes 30 unique slides with minimal colors. You can also edit the slides to change colors and images as well.

Free Finance Infographics PowerPoint Templates

This PowerPoint template includes a collection of creative and colorful infographic slides for presenting different types of data and statistics. There are 30 different slides included in this free template. And it’s also available in Google Slides format.

Banc – Business & Financial PowerPoint Template

Banc is a professional PowerPoint template designed for making all kinds of business and financial presentations. It comes with 30 different slide layouts that include company profile slides, team management slides, charts, graphs, and more.

Financie – Finance PowerPoint Presentation Template

With this PowerPoint template, you can create modern slide decks for delivering powerful presentations. It’s especially suitable for creating presentations related to the latest trends in finance, cryptocurrency, trading, and more. The template has a total of 150 slides, featuring 30 slides in 5 different color schemes.

Annual Report – Business & Finance PowerPoint Template

This PowerPoint template is great for making various annual report presentations, including financial reports. It features a total of 34 unique slides with fully editable designs. You can also include pyramid charts, graphs, timelines, and more in your presentations with pre-made slides in the template.

Financial Planning & Investment PowerPoint Template

You can use this PowerPoint template to create more sophisticated presentations for financial planning and investment management meetings. It includes 10 carefully crafted slides that are useful in presenting your data and ideas.

For more professional templates, you can check out our best business PowerPoint templates collection.

How to Write a Great Financial Report? Tips and Best Practices

Table of contents

To make informed financial decisions in your company, you first have to be, well, informed.

Understanding the financial activity of your company sets the foundation for identifying good business opportunities and making the right decisions to ensure future growth.

By tracking, organizing, and analyzing financial performances, you will have a clearer picture of where the money is going and where it’s coming from. No wonder finance is one of the most monitored and reported operations, according to Databox’s State of Business Reporting .

To stay on top of numbers, companies use financial reports.

Financial reports are formal documents that capture all the significant financial activities within a business in a specific period.

While these reports are extremely useful for you and your key stakeholders, you won’t be the only one reaping the fruits. Financial statements are also examined by potential investors and banks since they provide them with enough insight to determine whether they want to invest in your business.

In this article, we are going to walk you through what financial reports are, why they are significant and show you a step-by-step guide that will take your financial reports and business reporting as a whole, to the next level.

What Is a Financial Report?

What is the purpose of financial reporting, what are the types of financial reporting, how to write a financial report, finance report examples.

• Improve Financial Reporting with Databox

Financial reports are official company documents that showcase all the financial activities and performances of your business over a specific period. Usually, they are created on a quarterly or yearly basis.

Every business is legally obliged to use financial reporting to display its current financial status and organize financial data.

The documents are available for public view which means that potential banks and investors will most likely analyze them before they decide to work with you and invest in your business.

They are also important for tracking future profitability estimates, business growth, and overall financial health.

At bottom, financial reports provide you with insight into how much money you have, how much did you spend, and where it is coming from. Based on the data within the report, you can make informed business decisions and create plans for future spending.

The key things a financial report should include are:

• Cash flow data
• Asset and liability evaluation
• Shareholder equity analysis
• Profitability measurements

Related : Quarterly Business Review: How to Write One and How to Present It Successfully

Financial reports are used to track, analyze, and display your company’s cash flow .

Understanding how your business is performing from a financial standpoint can seem like an impossible task without these reports.

However, financial reports aren’t used only because they are practical; you are legally required to include them.

Here are some of the main ways in which financial reports can help your business:

Communicate essential data

Monitors income and expenses, supports financial analysis and decision-making.

• Simplify your taxes

Having an insight into the current financial situation of your business is important to each high-ranking member of the company (stakeholders, executives, investors, and partners).

You will use this financial data to create budget plans and monitor the company’s overall performance. When you establish an open communication and transparency policy within your business, you are more likely to attract new investors and enhance funding.

The information communicated in financial statements is what investors rely on when they are assessing risks, profitability, and future returns.

One way to gain the trust of investors is to showcase how your financial performance stacks up against your peers. For example, by joining this benchmark group , you can better understand your gross profit margin performance and see how metrics like income, gross profit, net income, net operating increase, etc compare against businesses like yours.

For example, you can discover that the median gross profit a month for B2B, B2C, SaaS and eCommerce is 73.79K . If you perform better than the median, this might be a good incentive for your investors to increase your funding.

*Important note: Databox Benchmark Groups show median values. The median is calculated by taking the “middle” value, the value for which half of the observations are larger and half are smaller. The average is calculated by adding up all of the individual values and dividing this total by the number of observations. While both are measures of central tendency, when there is a possibility of extreme values, the median is generally the better measure to use.

Benchmark Your Performance Against Hundreds of Companies Just Like Yours

Viewing benchmark data can be enlightening, but seeing where your company’s efforts rank against those benchmarks can be game-changing. 

Browse Databox’s open Benchmark Groups and join ones relevant to your business to get free and instant performance benchmarks. 

Financial reporting involves tracking incomes and expenses for a specific time period. To establish efficient debt management and budget allocation, you will need an insight into the most important spending areas .

By tracking income and expenses , you will also understand current liabilities and assets. Analyzing financial documentation will provide you with a bigger picture regarding the key metrics such as debt-to-asset ratios that investors use to calculate potential profitability.

All of this is information is crucial for staying ahead of your competitors.

Related : How to Write a Great Business Expense Report: A Step-By-Step Guide with Examples

The performance analysis in financial reports is what you rely on to make better business decisions.

Considering the different data that financial reports include, you can check out real-time information regarding historical performances, key spending areas, and use them to create accurate financial forecasts.

Implementing detailed financial analysis and using developed data models can help any business better evaluate current activities and make future business growth decisions.

You will be able to recognize trends, potential problems, and stay on top of your financial performances in real-time. This sets the foundation for quick and accurate economic decisions.

The main purpose of financial reports is to make sure your business is in compliance with the law and regulations of government agencies.

Regulatory institutions examine every document that evaluates the financial activities of your company. This is why making accurate financial documentation is crucial for the well-being of your business.

Aside from accuracy, you will also have to follow certain deadlines that these institutions set. This sometimes causes pressure in accounting departments to create complex financial reports quickly and accurately, which is why regular bookkeeping is immensely important.

In the US, private and public companies have to be compliant with the GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles), while international companies mostly report under the IRFS (International Reporting Financial Standards).

Both of these organizations provide some standard guidelines but there are a few differences you will have to pay attention to when creating your financial statements.

Simplify your taxes  

No matter how big or small your business is, doing taxes can be a stressful task.

By creating accurate financial reports, you can make tax calculation a lot easier since you will minimize any chances of error and save time by including all financial data in one document.

Not only that, since financial reports are a legal requirement, the IRS uses them to evaluate the tax income of each individual company. 

Additionally, with the introduction of Making Tax Digital (MTD) in many countries, including the UK, it is now mandatory for businesses to maintain digital records and submit tax returns digitally. This means that accurate financial reports are more important than ever, as they will be used to populate the required digital tax submissions.

While financial reports all have the same goal, there are a few different types that you should know about.

This isn’t only a matter of compliance or best practice, these reports are key for understanding the different segments of cash flow.

Here are the main types of financial reporting:

Balance Sheet

Cash flow statement, income statement, shareholder equity statement.

A balance sheet is a financial statement that tracks the total amount of assets, liabilities, and shareholder equities within your company. They also provide you with a real-time evaluation of asset liquidity and debt coverage.

Most companies create balance sheets on a quarterly basis and include the data from each quarter in the annual report.

When creating a balance sheet, there is an asset page (includes available cash, equipment value, inventory value, etc.) and a liability page (includes accounts payable, credit card balances, bank loans, etc.) that you need to fulfill.

Once you total these assets and liabilities, you will subtract liabilities from the assets. The amount you get is what is called ‘owner’s equity’.

This is a financial statement that records all the different cash flow activities in the company.

Cash flow statements track cash generated and cash spent amounts in a specific time period. This report is crucial for measuring whether companies generate enough cash to cover their debts. Also, it provides insight into fund operations, investments, and the overall activities that are generating revenue.

This statement is helpful for investors since they can use it to determine whether your business presents a good investment opportunity .

While balance sheets incorporate certain calculations to determine financial values, cash flow statements are consisted of three main elements:

• Operational activities – inventories, wages, tax income, accounts receivable, accounts payable, and cash receipts
• Investment activities – investment earnings use, investment earnings generation, asset sales, issued loans, payments from mergers
• Financing activities – payable dividends, debt payments, debt issuance, cash from investors, and stock repurchases

The income statement records the company’s expenses, revenue, and net loss/income over a specific time period.

Balance sheets focus on the current activities and performances while income sheets track them over a longer period. Businesses tend to track income statements each quarter to gain better insight into the different financial processes that occur.

Income statements include profits and losses , which is why they are also called P&L statements (Profits & Losses).

The main elements included on the income statement are:

• Operating revenue – financial data regarding sales of products or services
• Net and gross revenue – includes the total sales revenue and remaining revenue (after the cost subtraction)
• Primary expenses – these include general costs, administrative costs, depreciation and selling, and COGS (cost of goods sold)
• Secondary expenses – capital loss, asset loss, debt interest, and loan interest
• Nonoperating revenue – this is revenue that comes from accrued interest, it includes investment returns, capital gains, and royalty payments

Even though shareholder’s equity is usually included on the balance sheet, larger companies tend to report these activities on a separate statement.

This statement tracks the amount of money key stakeholders invest in the business. The investments most commonly include company stocks and securities. After dividends are released to stockholders, the retained earnings in the company change.

Stakeholder equity statement includes these key components:

• Retained earnings after dividends and losses have been subtracted
• Common/preferred stock sales
• Purchased treasury stock
• Generated income (including the income that comes from unrealized capital gains)

Pro Tip: How to Stay on Top of the Financial Health of Your Business

Do you own and manage a small business? Then you know how much of a struggle it can be to stay on top of the financial health of your business on a daily basis. Now you can pull data from QuickBooks and HubSpot’s CRM to track your key business metrics in one convenient dashboard, including:

• Open deals and deal amounts by pipeline stage. Get sales data directly from your HubSpot CRM and track deals, deal amounts, deal stages, and dates from your sales pipeline. 
• Key financial data. Track gross profit margin, open invoices by amount and by customer, paid invoices, expenses, and income from QuickBooks.

Now you can benefit from the experience of our HubSpot CRM and QuickBooks experts, who have put together a plug-and-play Databox template that helps you monitor and analyze your key financial metrics. It’s simple to implement and start using, and best of all, it’s free!

You can easily set it up in just a few clicks – no coding required.

To set up the dashboard, follow these 3 simple steps:

Step 1: Get the template 

Step 2: Connect your HubSpot and Quickbooks accounts with Databox. 

Step 3: Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.

Financial reports help you understand your company’s financial performance, attract potential investors, and are legally required. This is why you have to make sure that they are as accurate as possible.

You want your financial reports to be comprehensive, understandable, and precise.

Even though creating a good financial report can be very complex, we are going to show you a step-by-step guide that will make the whole process much easier.

Follow these steps to create a great financial report:

Step 1 – Make a Sales Forecast

Step 2 – create a budget for expenses, step 3 – create a cash flow statement, step 4 – estimate net profit, step 5 – manage assets and liabilities, step 6 – find the breakeven point.

When making a sales forecast, the first thing you should do is create a spreadsheet that includes your sales performance from the last three years.

Use a specific section for each line of sales and organize columns for each month of year one. For years two and three, organize columns on a quarterly basis.

Create three different blocks – one for pricing, one for unit sales, and the third one for multiplying units by unit cost (to calculate the cost of sales).

Cost of sales is important because it helps you calculate a precise gross margin.

Once you do the math, you can make an accurate sales forecast that is backed up by historic financial data.

PRO TIP: If you are using HubSpot CRM to visualize your sales data, watch the video below to learn how to set up and track your HubSpot CRM data in order to more accurately forecast your sales this month, quarter, and beyond.

Once you have made a sales forecast, you will want to calculate how much it will cost you.

When creating an expense budget, you should include both fixed costs (rent, payroll, etc.) and variable costs (marketing and promotional expenses). Costs such as interest and taxes can’t be completely accurate, so you are going to have to make rough estimates.

For taxes, you can multiply the estimated debt balance by your estimated tax percentage rate.

To estimate interest, multiply your estimated debt balance by an estimated interest rate.

We already mentioned what cash flow statements are and why they are so important for your business. They are typically created based on the sales forecast, balance sheet components, and other estimates.

To make cash flow estimates, companies should use historical financial statements. If your business is relatively new, you should project cash flow statements by breaking them down into 12 months.

Your way of invoicing is also linked to cash flow estimates.

For example, if a customer has the right to pay for your services after 30 days, the cash flow statement will show that you only collected 80% of your invoices within the month (while you need 100% to cover the expenses).

To estimate net profit, you should use the numbers from your sales forecast, expense estimates, and cash flow statement.

You can calculate the net profit by subtracting expenses, interests, and taxes from the gross margin .

This step is extremely important since it serves as a profit and loss statement that helps you create a detailed business forecast for the next three years.

In order to estimate your business’s net worth at the end of a fiscal year, you have to be able to manage assets and liabilities that won’t be shown in the profits and loss statement.

Come up with a rough estimate of how much money you expect to have on hand each month and include accounts receivable, inventory, land, and equipment.

After that, calculate liabilities, debts from outstanding loans, and accounts payable.

You know that you have found a breakeven point if your business expenses are in line with the sales volume.

The three-year income estimation should help you acquire this analysis. In viable businesses, the total revenue should exceed total expenses.

For potential investors, this kind of information is crucial since they want to be reassured that they are investing in a company with steady growth.

Nowadays, most companies use different tools and templates to make their reporting process easier. Using dashboards can help you track the metrics you obtain from the financial management tools that your business integrates.

Databox offers pre-built financial templates that can help you track the most important financial metrics in one place.

With our comprehensive dashboards, you can follow the most significant numbers and later include them in your financial report, making the whole process less time-consuming.

We understand that each business is different, which is why you can also customize the reports in any way you deem fit and at any time.

Here are some of our most popular financial reports that you can try out:

• Quickbooks Profit and Loss Overview Dashboard

Xero Profitability Overview Dashboard

Stripe (mrr & churn) dashboard, profitwell revenue trends dashboard, paypal (account overview) dashboard, quickbooks profit and loss overview dashboard.

To gain valuable insight into the sales and expenses that incur in your business, you can use the QuickBooks Profit and Loss Overview Dashboard .

Make sure you are staying on top of your numbers by tracking monthly, quarterly, and yearly income. Also, this report will help you figure out how profitable your company is and which areas may need to be fixed.

Some of the key metrics you can follow are net profit, income by month, expenses by month, and profit margin.

Xero is one of the most popular accounting systems that companies use to manage their financial positions. However, it can sometimes be hard to organize the large amount of data this tool provides.

This is where the Xero Profitability Overview Dashboard can come in handy. This customizable template will provide you with a comprehensive view of the sales and expenses that go into your Xero system.

Once the time comes for creating a financial report, you can simply integrate the data you gathered in this dashboard.

The key metrics it includes are net profit, income by month, expenses by month, profits, losses, gross profit, and other income.

Use the Stripe Dashboard to monitor your churn rate and track MRR growth in real-time. Also, you can check how many customers your business currently has at any given time.

Once you connect your Stripe account to this template, you will be able to answer these questions:

• How much money did I make through sales today?
• How can I track my MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue)?
• How many active customers do we have?
• How much revenue did I lose from churned customers?

Some of the metrics you can visualize are churn rate goal, customer churn rate, gross volume, revenue churn, and customers.

Profitwell Revenue Trends Dashboard allows you to monitor all the incoming sources of revenue for your SaaS business and keep track of the important churn metrics.

You can use this free template to see how fast your business is growing. The SaaS metrics will all be located in one comprehensive dashboard and you can visualize all the data with only one click.

Also, you can compare revenue from upgrades and downgrades and investigate your churn ratio revenue.

The PayPal Account Overview Dashboard is extremely useful for bigger companies who want to have a clear overview of their payments, refunds, sales, and other key metrics that your business relies on.

Connecting your PayPal account to the template can be done in a matter of minutes and you will get the answers to questions such as:

• How can I track gross sales?
• What is the best way to calculate net sales?
• How much did I spend on PayPal fees in the previous month?
• How can I check my PayPal account balance?
• How much money was returned through refunds last month?

Streamline Financial Reporting with Databox

Since the financial reports you create will be examined by both government agencies and potential investors, you will want to make sure that they are top-notch.

However, the reporting process can sometimes feel a bit overwhelming and you will face a lot of pressure trying to create the perfect report.

Databox can help relieve this stress and enhance your financial reporting skills.

No matter if you create these financial statements quarterly or annually, you will end up with a handful of data to analyze. With financial reporting software such as Databox, this analysis process will become both simpler and quicker.

With our customizable dashboards, you can visualize all the most important data and gather it in one place. Aside from being visually pleasing, your reports will also be much more engaging and minimize any chances of error since the information will be imported directly from your financial management tools.

To satisfy both your company’s key stakeholders and potential partners, you can sign up here for a free trial and put your financial reporting on autopilot.

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Presentation of Financial Statements (IAS 1)

Last updated: 14 November 2023

IAS 1 serves as the main standard that outlines the general requirements for presenting financial statements. It is applicable to ‘general purpose financial statements’, which are designed to meet the informational needs of users who cannot demand customised reports from an entity. Documents like management commentary or sustainability reports, which are often included in annual reports, fall outside the scope of IFRS, as indicated in IAS 1.13-14. Similarly, financial statements submitted to a court registry are not considered general purpose financial statements (see IAS 1.BC11-13).

The standard primarily focuses on annual financial statements, but its guidelines in IAS 1.15-35 also extend to interim financial reports (IAS 1.4). These guidelines address key elements such as fair presentation, compliance with IFRS, the going concern principle, the accrual basis of accounting, offsetting, materiality, and aggregation. For comprehensive guidance on interim reporting, please refer to IAS 34 .

Note that IAS 1 will be superseded by the upcoming IFRS 18 Presentation and Disclosure in Financial Statements .

Now, let’s explore the general requirements for presenting financial statements in greater detail.

Financial statements

Components of a complete set of financial statements.

Paragraph IAS 1.10 outlines the elements that make up a complete set of financial statements. Companies have the flexibility to use different titles for these documents, but each statement must be presented with equal prominence (IAS 1.11). The terminology used in IAS 1 is tailored for profit-oriented entities. However, not-for-profit organisations or entities without equity (as defined in IAS 32), may use alternative terminology for specific items in their financial statements (IAS 1.5-6).

Are you tired of the constant stream of IFRS updates? I know it's tough. That's why I've created Reporting Period – a once-a-month digest for professional accountants. It consolidates all essential IFRS developments and Big 4 insights into one concise, readable email. I personally curate every issue to ensure it's packed with the most relevant information, delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe for free, enjoy a spam-free experience, and remember, you can opt out anytime with a single click.

Compliance with IFRS

Financial statements must include an explicit and unreserved statement of compliance with IFRS in the accompanying notes. This statement is only valid if the entity adheres to all the requirements of every IFRS standard (IAS 1.16). In many jurisdictions, such as the European Union, laws mandate compliance with a locally adopted version of IFRS.

IAS 1 does consider extremely rare situations where an entity might diverge from a specific IFRS requirement. Such a departure is permissible only if it prevents the presentation of misleading information that would conflict with the objectives of general-purpose financial reporting (IAS 1.20-22). Alternatively, entities can disclose the impact of such a departure in the notes, explaining how the statements would appear if the exception were made (IAS 1.23).

Identification of financial statements

The guidelines for identifying financial statements outlined in IAS 1.49-53 are straightforward and rarely cause issues in practice.

Going concern

The ‘going concern’ principle is a cornerstone of IFRS and other major GAAP. It assumes that an entity will continue to operate for the foreseeable future (at least 12 months). IAS 1 mandates management to assess whether the entity is a ‘going concern’. Should there be any material uncertainties regarding the entity’s future, these must be disclosed (IAS 1.25-26). IFRSs do not provide specific accounting principles for entities that are not going concerns, other than requiring disclosure of the accounting policies used. One of the possible approaches is to measure all assets and liabilities using their liquidation value.

See also this educational material at IFRS.org.

Materiality and aggregation

IAS 1.29-31 emphasise the importance of materiality in preparing user-friendly financial statements. While IFRS mandates numerous disclosures, entities should only include information that is material. This concept should be at the forefront when preparing financial statements, as reminders about materiality are seldom provided in other IFRS standards or publications.

Generally, entities should not offset assets against liabilities or income against expenses unless a specific IFRS standard allows or requires it. IAS 1.32-35 offer guidance on what can and cannot be offset. Offsetting of financial instruments is discussed further in IAS 32 .

Frequency of reporting

Entities are required to present a complete set of financial statements at least annually (IAS 1.36). However, some Public Interest Entities (PIEs) may be obliged to release financial statements more frequently, depending on local regulations. However, these are typically interim financial statements compiled under IAS 34 .

IAS 1 also allows for a 52-week reporting period instead of a calendar year (IAS 1.37). This excerpt from Tesco’s annual report serves to demonstrate this point, showing that the group uses 52-week periods for their financial year, even when some subsidiaries operate on a calendar-year basis:

If an entity changes its reporting period, it must clearly disclose this modification and provide the rationale for the change (IAS 1.36). It is advisable to include an explanatory note with comparative data that aligns with the new reporting period for clarity.

Comparative information

As a general guideline, entities should present comparative data for the prior period alongside all amounts reported for the current period, even when specific guidelines in a given IFRS do not require it. However, there’s no obligation to include narrative or descriptive information about the preceding period if it isn’t pertinent for understanding the current period (IAS 1.38).

If an entity opts to provide comparative data for more than the immediately preceding period, this additional information can be included in selected primary financial statements only. However, these additional comparative periods should also be detailed in the relevant accompanying notes (IAS 1.38C-38D).

IAS 1.40A-46 outlines how to present the statement of financial position when there are changes in accounting policies, retrospective restatements, or reclassifications. This entails producing a ‘third balance sheet’ at the start of the preceding period (which may differ from the earliest comparative period, if more than one is presented). Key points to note are:

• The third balance sheet is required only if there’s a material impact on the opening balance of the preceding period (IAS 1.40A(b)).
• If a third balance sheet is included, there’s no requirement to add a corresponding third column in the notes, although this could be useful where numbers have been altered by the change (IAS 1.40C).
• Interim financial statements do not require a third balance sheet (IAS 1.BC33).

IAS 8 also requires comprehensive disclosures concerning changes in accounting policies and corrections of errors .

Statement of financial position

IAS 1.54 enumerates the line items that must, at a minimum, appear in the statement of financial position. Entities should note that separate lines are not required for immaterial items (IAS 1.31). Additional line items can be added for entity-specific or industry-specific matters. IAS 1 permits the inclusion of subtotals, provided the criteria set out in IAS 1.55A are met.

Additional disclosure requirements are set out in IAS 1.77-80A. Of particular interest are the requirements pertaining to equity (IAS 1.79), which begin with the number of shares and extend to include details such as ‘rights, preferences, and restrictions relating to share capital, including restrictions on the distribution of dividends and the repayment of capital.’ While these kinds of limitations are common across various legal jurisdictions (for example, not all retained earnings can be distributed as dividends), many companies neglect to disclose such limitations in their financial statements.

For guidance on classifying assets and liabilities as either current or non-current, please refer to the separate page dedicated to this topic.

Statement of profit or loss and other comprehensive income

IAS 1 provides two methods for presenting profit or loss (P/L) and other comprehensive income (OCI). Entities can either combine both P/L and OCI into a single statement or present them in separate statements (IAS 1.81A-B). Additionally, the P/L and total comprehensive income for a given period should be allocated between the owners of the parent company and non-controlling interests (IAS 1.81B).

Minimum contents in P/L and OCI

IAS 1.82-82A specifies the minimum items that must appear in the P/L and OCI statements. These items are required only if they materially impact the financial statements (IAS 1.31).

Entities are permitted to add subtotals to the P/L statement if they meet the criteria specified in IAS 1.85A. Operating income is often the most commonly used subtotal in P/L. This practice may be attributed to the 1997 version of IAS 1, which mandated the inclusion of this subtotal—although this is no longer the case. IAS 1.BC56 clarifies that an operating profit subtotal should not exclude items commonly considered operational, such as inventory write-downs, restructuring costs, or depreciation/amortisation expenses.

Profit or loss (P/L)

All items of income and expense must be recognised in P/L (or OCI). This means that no income or expenses should be recognised directly in the statement of changes in equity, unless another IFRS specifically mandates it (IAS 1.88). Direct recognition in equity may also result from intra-group transactions . IAS 1.97-98 require separate disclosure of material items of income and expense, either directly in the income statement or in the notes.

Expenses in P/L can be presented in one of two ways (IAS 1.99-105):

• By their nature (e.g., depreciation, employee benefits); or
• By their function within the entity (e.g., cost of sales, distribution costs, administrative expenses).

When opting for the latter, entities must provide additional details on the nature of the expenses in the accompanying notes (IAS 1.104).

Other comprehensive income (OCI)

OCI encompasses income and expenses that other IFRS specifically exclude from P/L. There is no conceptual basis for deciding which items should appear in OCI rather than in P/L. Most companies present P/L and OCI as separate statements, partly because OCI is generally overlooked by investors and those outside of accounting and financial reporting circles. The concern is that combining the two could reduce net profit to merely a subtotal within total comprehensive income.

All elements that constitute OCI are specifically outlined in IAS 1.7, as part of its definitions.

Reclassification adjustments

A reclassification adjustment refers to the amount reclassified to P/L in the current period that was recognised in OCI in the current or previous periods (IAS 1.7). All items in OCI must be grouped into one of two categories: those that will or will not be subsequently reclassified to P/L (IAS 1.82A). Reclassification adjustments must be disclosed either within the OCI statement or in the accompanying notes (IAS 1.92-96).

To illustrate, foreign exchange differences arising on translation of foreign operations and gains or losses from certain cash flow hedges are examples of items that will be reclassified to P/L. In contrast, remeasurement gains and losses on defined benefit employee plans or revaluation gains on properties will not be reclassified to P/L.

The practice of transferring items from OCI to P/L, commonly known as ‘recycling’, lacks a concrete conceptual basis and the criteria for allowing such transfers in IFRS are often considered arbitrary.

Tax effects

OCI items can be presented either net of tax effects or before tax, with the overall tax impact disclosed separately. In either case, entities must specify the tax amount related to each item in OCI, including any reclassification adjustments (IAS 1.90-91). Interestingly, there is no such requirement to disclose tax effects for individual items in the income statement.

Statement of changes in equity

IAS 1.106 outlines the minimum line items that must be included in the statement of changes in equity. Subsequent paragraphs specify the disclosure requirements, which can be addressed either within the statement itself or in the accompanying notes. It’s crucial to note that changes in equity during a reporting period can arise either from income and expense items or from transactions involving owners acting in their capacity as owners (IAS 1.109). This means that entities cannot adjust equity directly based on changes in assets or liabilities unless these adjustments result from transactions with owners, such as capital contributions or dividend payments, or are otherwise mandated by other IFRSs.

Statement of cash flows

The statement of cash flows is governed by IAS 7 .

• Explanatory notes

Structure of explanatory notes

The structure for explanatory notes is detailed in IAS 1.112-116. In practice, there are several commonly adopted approaches to organising these notes:

Approach #1:

• Primary financial statements (P/L, OCI, etc.)
• Statement of compliance and basis of preparation
• Accounting policies

Approach #1 is logically coherent, as understanding accounting policies is crucial before delving into the financial data. However, in reality, few people read the accounting policies in their entirety. Consequently, users often have to navigate past several pages of accounting policies to reach the explanatory notes.

Approach #2:

• Primary financial statements (P/L, OCI, etc)

In Approach #2, accounting policies are treated as an appendix and positioned at the end of the financial statements. The advantage here is that all numerical data is clustered together, uninterrupted by extensive descriptions of accounting policies.

Approach #3:

• Explanatory notes integrated with relevant accounting policies

Approach #3 pairs accounting policies directly with the associated explanatory notes. For example, accounting policies relating to inventory would appear alongside the explanatory note that breaks down inventory components.

Management of capital

IAS 1.134-136 outline the disclosures related to capital management. These provisions apply to all entities, whether or not they are subject to external capital requirements. An important note here is that entities are not obligated to disclose specific values or ratios concerning capital objectives or requirements.

IAS 1.137 mandates disclosure of dividends proposed or declared before the financial statements were authorised for issue but not recognised as a distribution to owners during the period. Furthermore, entities are required to disclose the amount of any cumulative preference dividends not recognised.

Disclosure of accounting policies

IAS 1 specifies the requirements for disclosing accounting policy information which are discussed here .

Disclosing judgements and sources of estimation uncertainty

IAS 1 mandates disclosing judgements and sources of estimation uncertainty .

Other disclosures

Additional miscellaneous disclosure requirements are detailed in paragraphs IAS 1.138.

IFRS 18 Presentation and Disclosure in Financial Statements

The upcoming IFRS 18 Presentation and Disclosure in Financial Statements , which will supersede IAS 1, aims to enhance the comparability and transparency of financial reporting, focusing on the statement of profit or loss. Key changes include:

• The introduction of two new subtotals in the P/L statement: ‘operating profit’ and ‘profit before financing and income taxes’.
• A requirement for the reconciliation of management-defined performance measures (also known as ‘non-GAAP’ measures) with those specified by IFRS.
• Refined guidelines for the aggregation and disaggregation of information within the primary financial statements.
• Limited changes to the statement of cash flows, establishing operating profit as a starting point for the indirect method and eliminating options for the classification of interest and dividend cash flows.

Learn more in this BDO’s publication .

The release of IFRS 18 is expected in Q2 2024. This new IFRS will be effective from 1 January 2027 with early application permitted.

© 2018-2024 Marek Muc

The information provided on this website is for general information and educational purposes only and should not be used as a substitute for professional advice. Use at your own risk. Excerpts from IFRS Standards come from the Official Journal of the European Union (© European Union, https://eur-lex.europa.eu). You can access full versions of IFRS Standards at shop.ifrs.org. IFRScommunity.com is an independent website and it is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or in any other way associated with the IFRS Foundation. For official information concerning IFRS Standards, visit IFRS.org.

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Presenting financials to boards: A how-to guide.

​Presenting financials to a board may, on the face of it, seem like a fairly straightforward task. Actually, it’s not. That’s because you’re not just presenting financials, you’re telling a story. And good storytelling is hard to do.

I’ve learned that getting it right requires a combination of a strong narrative, unambiguous messaging, and clear visuals that effectively communicate the data. Knowing how to frame the story begins by understanding your audience. Because not all boards, and not all board members, are the same, doing the groundwork to understand the board, its members, and their priorities, is a critical first step.

In general, determining the kind of board depends on whether its members see their role as partners in the operational running of the business or as being more focused on broad oversight. This is often influenced by what type of investors are on the board. When a board is composed of private equity investors, it’s likely that they will be more active and engaged in company decision making. Private equity investors tend to have smaller portfolio companies and take an active role in operational matters and decision making to support the results they are seeking from each of their portfolio companies. These members typically want to see more detail in order to gain a deeper understanding of the financial data, options, and context for decision making.

In contrast, VC investors tend to make more investments, spreading their bets across a broader portfolio of companies. As such, as board members, they’re less focused on tactical decision making, and on the operational details impacting a company, and instead are more interested in key valuation metrics and trends.

After establishing whether a board wants details for decision making or more summary information to support oversight responsibility, take a closer look at the individual members and their preferences for information. I suggest arranging a 30-minute meeting with each member right from the start to set expectations and determine the priorities of each. What metrics are they looking for? How do they define company success? Boards add and replace members at various points, so this interview should be conducted each time a new member joins. How will the new member impact the dynamic of the entire board?

Understanding board members’ goals allows the executive team to be proactive, not reactive, in deciding which metrics to include and how much depth to display. 

Create a document to serve as a minimum viable product (MVP) — to borrow a term — to circulate before the first presentation. Ask for feedback on the MVP from each member and incorporate their thoughts into the final presentation. This template then becomes the working model going forward.

Think visually.

Having a solid mastery of the numbers underlying a report is essential, but that doesn’t mean that a board needs, or wants, all the details. Instead, convey a sense of confidence in the numbers and faith in their accuracy. Present a narrative that will grab their attention, without overwhelming with detail. A few visual presentation strategies include:

1. Avoid long lists of bullet points:  Filling every slide with bullets was my first instinct when I started preparing board decks, but I was quickly disabused of the practice. I now follow a general rule that a board slide shouldn’t contain any more than four bullet points. This can be challenging, but the audience is really only looking for key information. Most members spend just a few seconds looking at a slide, so a presentation has to make the most of their time.

2. Presenting information visually is a much more concise way to convey it:  Most of us finance types don’t have the visual or graphic design skills first cataloged by Edward Tufte in his seminal work “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.”

We’ve been steeped in spreadsheets, pivot tables, and simple graphics, which are not what a board wants to see. I am always considering new ways of visualizing data and am on the lookout for great graphs that others have created. 

The ultimate goal is to paint a picture with the numbers. For example, one metric everyone likes to see is cash activity — displaying the dynamic nature of this metric makes it easier for board members to instantly understand the trends.

3. Remember that some board members may not have a thorough understanding of the industry:  Take a step back and think about how to best convey the important points. The words and images should tell a story about what the numbers mean. So, for example, don’t just show the LTV:CAC ratio. Interpret the number and share guidance around it. Where is it going? What action is needed to achieve the company’s goals?

Depending on the makeup of the board, this may require including detailed financials, but make sure they’re in an appendix at the end of the presentation. A screenshot of the cash balance sheet and income statement can always be referenced if necessary.

Determining benchmarks for success.

The chosen metrics will require agreed-upon benchmarks to put them into context. These benchmarks are typically determined by management since they have the best knowledge of the company. However, some board members may have a depth of experience in the industry sector to contribute information about benchmarks, and this is something that should be uncovered in the initial due diligence with them. Benchmarks can also be drawn from research into public information, such as competitors’ SEC filings. Investment bankers and equity research analysts are good resources. I suggest taking the time to cultivate relationships with them to help stay on top of industry trends.

For growing companies in relatively new industries, it’s probably most effective to look at the traditional indicators of growth, such as lifetime value, CAC, and customer payback period, as well as traditional financial metrics, like EBITDA and revenue per employee. It’s easy to compare these metrics against other companies under a similar umbrella, even if they’re not direct competitors.

From the board’s point of view, it comes down to being able to show how well a business is deploying capital and labor. Newer sectors can be more difficult to benchmark because there isn’t enough available data. But in those instances, the metrics that are traditionally observed by startups should be relevant. The indicators of success for a technology company don’t vary too much, no matter what industry their product targets.

The flow of information to the board.

Adapt content to fit the general cadence of the board meetings. For example, on a quarterly basis, prepare a more comprehensive and broad report to reach the whole audience, encompassing a three-month summary of activity and including all relevant metrics. For a monthly report, prepare a more simplified version, with a max of five or six pages, that can be easily tailored to each board member, and perhaps includes custom metrics that reflect each member’s specific interest. When I say customized, I am not suggesting presenting different metrics altogether. Instead, consider providing variations of the same dataset. Investors who are more interested in tracking the short-term progress of a company might appreciate a weekly report showing specific KPIs.

Looking to the future.

Technological advances have given us more access to data than we’ve ever had before, and I expect that to continue. My view is that, over time, even though research and data crunching will be automated, we’ll need the critical-thinking skills of finance experts to pull it all together.

Data and data analytics will play increasingly powerful roles. I view this wealth of information as an opportunity to create more customized data visualizations for boards in order to foster better business decisions and more successful companies. 

This is something that every board, irrespective of its composition, is ultimately focused on.

I’ve compiled a small library of graphic displays that I’ve found useful. Below are some examples.

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11 Examples Of Financial Reports You Can Use For Daily, Weekly & Monthly Reports

Table of Contents

1) What Is A Financial Report?

2) Types Of Financial Reports

3) Annual Financial Report Example

4) Monthly Financial Reports Examples

5) Weekly Financial Report Templates

6) Daily Financial Report Examples

7) Why Do You Need Financial Reports?

8) Challenges Of Financial Reports

9) How To Make A Financial Report?

Regardless of your sector or industry, it’s likely that your finances department is the beating heart of your entire operation. Without financial fluency, it’s difficult for an organization to thrive, which means that keeping your monetary affairs in order is essential.

As a business, you need the reliability of frequent business financial reports to gain a better grasp of the status of your finances, both current and future. In addition to empowering you to take a proactive approach concerning the management of your company’s economy, these tools help assist in increasing long-term profitability through short-term company financial statements.

A robust finance report communicates crucial accounting information that covers a specified period, such as daily, weekly, and monthly. These are powerful tools that you can apply to increase internal business performance. A data-driven finance report is also an effective means of remaining updated with any significant progress or changes in the status of your finances and helps you measure your results, cash flow, and overall profitability.

Here, we will look at these kinds of tools in greater detail, delving into daily, weekly, and annual reports but focusing mainly on monthly financial reports and examples you can use for creating your own, which we will present and explain later in the article alongside their relevance in today’s fast-paced, hyper-connected business world.

What Is A Financial Report?

A financial report or financial statement is a management tool used to communicate the performance of key financial activities efficiently. With the help of interactive KPIs, businesses can ensure steady growth and revenue while staying compliant with law and tax regulations.

As you can see in the example above, created with a professional financial business intelligence solution, a modern finance report can have all the relevant information right at your fingertips, offering the ability to visualize as well as analyze key data; they assist in uncovering fresh insights, spotting key financial trends, identifying strengths as well as weaknesses, and improving communication throughout the organization. We will explore even more examples of monthly statements later in the article.

We live in a data-driven age, and the ability to use financial insights and metrics to your advantage will set you apart from the pack. Online reporting tools to do that exist for that very purpose. To gain a panoramic view of your business’s financial activities, working with an annual, monthly, weekly, and daily financial report template will give you a well-rounded and comprehensive overview of every key area based on your specific aims, goals, and objectives.

Your organization needs these tools to help support certain objectives and enable you to provide useful information to investors, decision-makers, and creditors, especially if you work as a financial agency and need to create an interactive client dashboard . But not only, as it can also support your business in determining the following:

• If you can effectively generate cash and how that cash is used.
• To reveal specific business transaction details.
• To follow the results of your finances so you can identify potential issues that are impacting your profitability.
• Develop financial ratios that show the position of your business.
• Evaluate if your company can pay off all of your debts.

Daily reports, however, have a limited impact, as most of the financial KPIs that are used need mid-to-long-term monitoring and do not provide accurate information if analyzed only on a daily basis.

This is why we still mention them and provide examples of what can be tracked and analyzed every day, but for a long-term view, you should take a look at our annual, weekly, and monthly reports. The monthly ones are on top, illustrated with beautiful data visualizations that provide a better understanding of the metrics tracked.

Equipped with financial analytics software , you can easily produce these daily, weekly, monthly, and annual reports. They will provide your company with the insights it needs to remain profitable, meet objectives, evaluate your decision-making processes, and keep everyone in the value chain on track.

Your Chance: Want to test financial reporting software completely free? We offer a 14-day free trial. Benefit from great financial reports today!

Types Of Financial Reports

As stated above, finance statements are fundamental tools for businesses not only to track their performance and report to investors but also to stay compliant with law regulations that obligate them to respond to certain guidelines. That said, there are three major types, and we will cover them in detail below! 

Balance Sheet

A balance sheet is a statement that provides detailed information about a company’s assets, liabilities, and equity. Or in other words, what a company owns, owes, and is invested by shareholders. Balance sheets should portray the bigger picture of a business's financial health during a particular date. There is no mandatory frequency to generate balance sheets; some organizations prepare monthly statements, while others can do quarterly or annual ones. Let’s see each of the elements in more detail below. 

• Assets : The items your company owns that can provide future economic benefits. This can be from cash to furniture or equipment. 
• Liabilities : It is basically what your company owes to others. They can be divided into long-term liabilities, such as the lease of your office building or a bank loan, or short-term liabilities, which can be your credit card debt or wages to employees. 
• Equity : It represents the shareholder’s stake in the company . To calculate the shareholders’ equity, you need to subtract the total liabilities from the total assets. This calculation is based on the general accounting equation formula: Assets = Liabilities + Shareholders' Equity. Equity is used in many different ratios, such as ROA and ROE.

An important note regarding this type of statement is that it should always be balanced, hence the name. Your total assets should always equal the total liabilities and shareholder’s equity. If this is not the case, then there must be something wrong, and it needs to be looked into. Another consideration when it comes to balance sheets is always to compare them to other similar businesses, as they will vary depending on the industry.  

Income Statement

As its name suggests, the income statement portrays the revenue generated from sales as well as all the operating expenses involved in generating that income. Essentially, how much you made and how much you spent. While a balance sheet provides a snapshot of a business's monetary health at a specific point in time, an income statement shows the profitability of a business over an accounting period (month, quarter, or year).  

Also known as profit and loss, this is a fundamental document for any business as it not only tracks performance but it needs to be presented to the fiscal authorities to ensure compliance with law regulations. The income statement focuses on 4 key elements: revenue, expenses, gains, and losses. 

• Revenues : The revenue can be divided into operating and non-operating. On one hand, the operating one includes all income related to primary activities such as selling a product or service. On the other hand, the non-operating one is related to non-core business activities such as income from interest earned on capital lying in the bank or rental income from the business property. 
• Gains : Essentially, gains measure the money made from other activities that are non-business related and that are a one-time-only thing. For example: selling an old machine or unused land. 
• Expenses : All costs related to core operations. Just like revenue, expenses can be divided into primary and secondary. Primary expenses are all the ones linked to the operating revenue, while secondary ones are linked to non-operating revenue. 
• Losses : All expenses that cost the company to lose assets. They are unusual one-time costs, such as lawsuit expenses.  

The bottom line of the income statement is the Net Income which is basically the profit of the observed period. The net income is calculated with the following formula: Net Income= (Revenue + Gains) - (Expenses + Losses) 

Cash Flow Statement 

Last but not least, the cash flow statement (CFS) portrays how much money entered and left the business during a particular time period. It basically measures how well the company manages to generate cash to pay debt obligations and cover operating expenses. While an income statement can tell you whether a company made a profit, the cash flow can tell you if it made cash. The CFS is a fundamental document for investors as it helps them understand the liquidity of a company and make informed investment decisions. 

Usually, CFS is divided into three main sections: operating activities, investing activities, and financing activities. Let’s see them in more detail. 

• Operating activities : This refers to any sources or uses of cash from regular business activities such as sales of goods and services, interest payments, salary for employees, and tax payments, just to name a few. 
• Investing activities: This includes any sources or uses of cash from investments which can include purchases or sales of assets, loans made to vendors, and others. 
• Financing activities: This includes sources or uses of cash from investors and banks, such as dividends, payments for stock repurchases, and loans. 

Now that we have a better understanding of the definition and types, we are going to take a closer look at financial statements examples of daily, weekly, monthly, and annual reports and their associated KPIs. These examples will help your organization tick over the right way . Let's get started.

Annual Financial Report Example

We are hitting things off with the annual financial report. As its name suggests, these statements monitor the performance of a business for the duration of a year. They can include anything from a balance sheet, income statement, and CFS, as well as predictions for the coming year. Now we will look at an example of an interactive annual dashboard in the shape of an income statement comparing the actual vs. forecasted performance of an organization. 

**click to enlarge**

Financial forecasting is the process of using predictive analytics technologies to generate accurate predictions about future performance. This is done by analyzing a mix of historical and current data and finding patterns that can help organizations make better decisions. 

Our template above, generated with a modern dashboard maker , does just that. It starts by providing detailed information about the three most important metrics in an income statement: revenue, costs, and net profit. Each of them is displayed on a gauge chart with the actual value compared to a forecasted value, paired with the absolute and percentage difference between the two values. This way, users can quickly identify when something is lacking in performance compared to what was expected from it. 

The value of this high-level tool is the fact that it provides three months forecast based on the past 12 months performance. This allows managers to efficiently plan their strategies based on the expected costs and revenues. The dashboard also provides a breakdown of each of these metrics to analyze each element in detail. For instance, by looking at the past 6 months of the revenue breakdown chart, we can see that this business has not been reaching the forecasted amount, which means something might be going on that needs to be looked at. On the other hand, we can see that costs for marketing are slightly higher than expected, which can also be something to look into and see if these costs are justified.

Monthly Financial Reports Examples & Templates

Monthly financial reports are a management way of obtaining a concise overview of the previous month’s status to have up-to-date reporting of the cash management, profit, and loss statements while evaluating future plans and decisions moving forward.

These financial reporting examples offer a more panoramic view of an organization’s economic affairs, serving up elements of information covered in our daily and weekly explanations. By offering the ability to drill down into metrics over a four-week period, the data here is largely focused on creating bigger, more long-term changes, strategies, and initiatives.

These powerful documents offer detailed visual insights into the following areas:

• Cash management: A comprehensive overview of your organization’s liquidity and existing cash flow situation.
• Profit and loss: A critical glimpse into your company’s income statement and profits in a number of critical areas of the business.
• The bigger picture: A business financial report format offers a full overview of the company’s core financing activities over a monthly period, providing data geared towards developing sustainable strategies and improvements that will foster growth and increased profitability.

Coupled with the insights delivered by daily and weekly reports, monthly ones in the form of online dashboards are pivotal to not only gaining an edge on your competitors but also getting a predictive vision that will ensure you meet – and even exceed – your financial targets indefinitely. As a result, your overall efficiency will become flawless, and you’re likely to enjoy healthy growth in your year-on-year profits.

There is a wealth of KPIs to consider when looking at a monthly financial report sample. The best way to explain them in a practical context is by getting visual.

To help you understand how you can benefit from all of this, here are 5 monthly report examples, complete with explanatory insight and a deeper insight into their respective KPIs.

These interactive financial reports examples demonstrate the detail and insight you can gain from your online data analysis if you use it in the right way.

a) Cash Management Financial Report Template And KPIs

Our first example of a financial report provides you with a quick overview of your liquidity and current cash flow situation. Good management of cash flow is fundamental for success since a healthy cash flow means that the company has enough money to pay salaries and debts and invest in growth opportunities. However, bad management can lead to the end of a business since no cash means no operations. This example is critical to keeping your finances flowing across the organization and predicting future outcomes that will help you to stay always ahead of your finances.

The first portion of this dashboard examines the current ratio, which is simply the ratio between your current assets and liabilities. This metric demonstrates the flexibility your company has in immediately using the money for acquisitions or to pay off debts.  A really healthy current ratio would be about 2 to ensure your company will be able to pay current liabilities at any time and still have a buffer. Alongside this metric is the quick ratio, which is similar to the current ratio, except it takes into account only the near-cash assets, meaning all assets that you can convert into cash quickly, such as equipment or furniture. This means your quick ratio will always be lower than your current ratio. By monitoring these metrics, you can understand at a quick glance if your business is liquid or not. 

Next, the cash management dashboard goes more in detail into the situation of a business with two financial graphs visualizing the current accounts payable and receivable for a year, this way you can stay on top of your expenditures and money to be collected and avoid having future issues that will affect your liquidity. 

Current ratio: Core indication of a business’s short-term financial health, as well as indicating if you’re promptly collecting Accounts Due.

• This metric is measured by dividing debt and accounts payable by cash inventory and accounts receivables.

Quick ratio: As mentioned above, this metric only takes into account the short-term assets that you can turn into money within 90 days, like your accounts receivable. The higher the ratio, the healthier the liquidity of your business. Your goal should always be to keep your quick ratio at a minimum of 1,0. 

Accounts payable turnover ratio: This shows how quickly your organization pays off suppliers and other bills. It also shows the number of times your company can pay off the average accounts payable balance during a certain time period.

• For example, if your company purchases 10 million goods in a year and holds an average account payable of 2 million, the ratio is 5.
• A higher ratio shows suppliers and creditors that your company is on top of paying its bills.

b) Profit And Loss Financial Reports Examples And KPIs

Moving on with our list of financial reporting templates, the P&L dashboard gives a clear overview of the income statement, from the income earned to the final net profit; the whole is enhanced by relevant performance ratios.

An income statement, also known as a P&L, is one of the most powerful examples as it gives you a detailed snapshot of your company's financial performance and tells you how profitable your business was in a specific period of time.  

The dashboard above is a perfect example of a financial statement for P&L. First, we see the income statement that starts by calculating the gross profit, which is obtained by subtracting your total revenue from your COGS. Next, we have a list of operating expenses (OPEX) that include sales, marketing, and other general administration costs. The total OPEX is then subtracted from the gross profit to reach the operating profit (EBIT). Finally, the total amount of interest and taxes are subtracted from the EBIT, resulting in the final net profit of the business. By doing these simple calculations, you can quickly see how profitable your company is and if your costs and income are being managed properly. 

Additionally, the dashboard provides a glance at performance percentages of the main metrics of the income statement: gross profit, OPEX, EBIT, and net profit. This can be further utilized to find month-to-month trends in your expenses and prepare ahead of time for months in which your expenses will be higher. 

It is important to consider that an income statement will not tell you more detailed information about your finances, such as how much money your company has in total or how much debt you have. For this purpose, there is another type of document called a balance sheet, and we will see it in more detail in our next financial statement example. 

Operating profit margin (EBIT): It allows your business to monitor how much profit you are generating for each dollar of income. This metric is also referred to as “EBIT” for “earnings before interest and tax.”

• This metric measures how profitable your business model is and shows what’s leftover of your revenue after paying for operational costs.
• It doesn’t include revenue earned from investments or the effects of taxes.

Operating expense ratio: This monthly example indicates the operational efficiency of your business through the comparison of operating expenses and your total revenue.

• Essentially the lower your operating expenses, the more profitable your organization is.
• These KPIs are particularly helpful in benchmarking your company against other businesses.

Net profit margin: Measures your business’s profit minus operating expenses, interest, and taxes divided by total revenue.

• It’s one of the most closely monitored financial KPIs. The higher the net profit margin, the better.

COGS: The Cost of Good Sold is the total amount of money it costs you to produce your product or service. If your COGS and your revenues are too close, that means you are not making a lot of gains on each sale. 

• Separating COGS from operating expenses is a fundamental step, as it will tell you if you are overspending your revenues in operational processes. 

c) Financial Performance Report Template And KPIs

This particular financial statement template provides you with an overview of how efficiently you are spending your capital while providing a snapshot of the main metrics on your balance sheet.

Just like the income statement, a balance sheet is another powerful tool for understanding the performance of your business. As we see in the dashboard below, a balance sheet is divided into three main areas: assets, liabilities, and equity. 

Alongside the balance sheet, the dashboard displays four other important metrics: the ROA, WCR, ROE, and DER. These four KPIs give you an immediate picture of trends in how your company’s assets are being managed. Good management of your assets and healthy equity will bring new investors to your business and will prevent you from facing disasters for unexpected losses, or bankruptcy.  

Return on assets (ROA): This shows how profitable your businesses are compared to your total assets. Assets include both debt and equity.

• This is a critical metric to any potential investors because it shows them how efficiently management is using assets to generate earnings.

Return on equity (ROE): Calculates the profit your company generates for your shareholders. It is used to compare profitability amongst businesses in the same industry.

• This is measured by dividing your business’s net income by your shareholder's equity.

Debt equity ratio (DEB): This metric measures how much debt you are using to finance your assets and operations in comparison to the equity available. It is obtained by dividing the total liabilities by the stakeholder’s equity. 

d) Financial KPI Dashboard And KPIs

This financial report format created with a professional dashboard designer offers a broad overview of your business’s most critical economic activities, operating with KPIs that are developed specifically to answer vital questions on areas such as liquidity, invoicing, budgeting, and general accounting stability. A template that you can apply to almost every business across industries, this incredibly insightful tool is pivotal to maintaining a healthy, continually evolving financial profile. Let’s look at the KPIs linked to this most valuable example.

Working capital: A key performance indicator focused on financial stability, this metric will help you monitor your performance based on your company's assets and liabilities.

• In the context of this financial report format, working capital is vital as it will help you accurately gauge your business’s operational efficiency and short-term health.

Quick ratio/acid test: A KPI that offers instant insights as well as results, this metric serves up critical information concerning liquidity.

• The quick ratio/acid test is worth tracking – by measuring these particular metrics, you’ll be able to understand whether your company is scalable and, if not – which measures you need to take to foster growth.

Cash conversion cycle: Your cash conversion cycle (CCC) is a critical metric for any organization as it drills down into key areas of your company’s operational and managerial processes.

• Tracking your CCC with visual BI reporting tools is incredibly useful as it provides a quantifiable means of knowing the length of time it takes for your business to convert its inventory investments, in addition to other resources, into cash flows from sales.
• A steady, consistent CCC is generally a good sign, and if you spot noticeable fluctuations, you should conduct further analysis to identify the root of the issue.

Vendor payment error rate: Every business – including yours – works with third-party vendors or partners, and managing these relationships as efficiently as possible is critical to any organization’s ongoing financial health. That’s where the vendor payment error rate KPI comes in.

• By gaining an insight into potential errors or efficiencies relating to the payment of your vendors, you’ll be able to improve financial flow and efficiency while nurturing your most valuable professional relationships.
• If your vendor error rate is high, you will know that procurement inefficiencies exist, and you’ll be able to take appropriate action to improve your processes and avoid potential disputes.

Budget variance: Budgeting is one of the cornerstones of corporate financial health. This powerful KPI from this most critical financial report sample serves to express the difference between budgeted and genuine figures for a particular accounting category.

• Offering a quick-glance visualization of whether particular budgets are on track in specific areas and departments, this KPI allows you to get a grasp of variances between proposed and actual figures while obtaining the information required to make vital changes in the appropriate areas.
• Keeping your budget expectations and proposals as accurate and realistic as possible is critical to your company’s growth, which makes this metric an essential part of any business’s reporting toolkit.

e) Financial Statement Example For CFOs

Next, we look into a financial performance report focused on data relevant for CFOs that need to grasp high-level metrics such as revenue, gross profit, operating expenses, net income, berry ratio, EVA, payroll headcount ratio, and, finally, to build a strong team and customer base, satisfaction levels of each. This financial management report example will not only serve as a roadmap for depicting the monetary health of a company but also focus on team management and customer satisfaction, which are not traditional finance-related metrics but are important in this case for every modern CFO. This example shows the YTD until March, but it can also be used as one of our monthly financial statements examples. We will explain the KPIs in more detail below:

Berry ratio: This ratio is defined between gross profit and operating expenses (costs). This financial indicator is critical when showing if the company is generating a healthy amount of profit or losing money.

• When calculating the berry ratio, usually external income and interest aren't included, but depreciation and amortization could be, depending on the particularities of your strategy.
• An indicator over 1 means that the company is making a profit above all expenses, while a coefficient below 1 will indicate that the company is losing money.

Economic value added (EVA): Referred to as the economic profit of a company, EVA is a critical element to include in any finance report template as it will show the surplus profit over the WACC (weighted average cost of capital) demanded by the capital market.

• By gaining insights into the potential surplus and how profitable a company's projects are, the management performance can be reflected better. Moreover, it will reflect the idea that the business is profitable only when it starts to create wealth for its shareholders.
• Succinctly speaking, the financial statement should include EVA as it will show how much and from where a company is creating wealth.

Cost breakdown: This particular metric is extremely important in any finance department since costs are one of the financial pillars of an organization, no matter how large or small. Every organization needs to know where the costs are coming from in order to reduce them and, consequently, positively affect performance.

• If you see that most costs come from administrational activities, you should consider automating tasks as much as possible. By utilizing self service analytics tools , each professional in your team will be equipped to explore and generate insights on their own without burdening other departments and saving countless working hours.
• Generally, costs should not be looked upon purely on the basis of black and white. If sales and marketing cause cost increment, maybe they also deliver high volumes of income so the balance is healthy and not negative.

Satisfaction levels: C-level managers need to prepare financial analysis reports with satisfaction levels in mind. These indicators are not purely financial, but they do influence economics and can cause potential bottlenecks.

• If the financial team has a lower satisfaction level, you need to react fast in order to avoid potential talent loss that can cause the company serious money. Keeping the team satisfied by conducting regular feedback talks, and offering career progression and competitive salaries, for example, can only affect the business in positive ways since the motivation will rise as well as the quality of the working environment. In this case, you can also connect to an HR dashboard and follow the team's performance and satisfaction levels in more detail.
• If customers are unsatisfied, it can also cause damages from outside your team that can, consequently, influence financial performance. For this reason, customer service analytics should also be an important aspect to be covered in your CFO report .

The above example of financial statement is not only focused on pure numbers, as you can see, but also on the human aspect of team and customer management that every modern CFO needs to take into account in order to benefit strategies and deliver economic growth.

f) Financial Report Template For Operating Expenses

Last but not least, on our list of monthly financial statement examples, we have a template that focuses entirely on operating expenses analysis.  Operating expenses also referred to as OpEx, are all expenses that companies incur through their day-to-day operations. Such as rent, equipment, inventory, salaries, insurance, materials, marketing, sales, and much more, depending on the industry. It is fundamental for businesses to track their OpEx closely and regularly as they directly affect profitability. An organization that manages to keep its OpEx at a minimum while still maintaining profitability and efficiency stands to gain a massive competitive advantage. 

Our example below will help you do just that by providing a complete overview of the development of your OpEx on a month-to-month basis. Let’s explore it in detail below. 

* *click to enlarge**

The value of this template lies in its level of detail. Traditional income statements track all OpEx together without differentiating between fixed and variable ones. Making it harder to extract deeper conclusions from the data. Our OpEx report above differentiates fixed and variable expenses and shows the monthly development of both compared to the performance of the previous year. This way, users can extract valuable conclusions to improve their strategies and overall financial performance. For instance, by looking at the OpEx development chart on the top, we can see that, overall, both fixed and variable expenses are higher compared to the benchmark. This can be because the company is producing more goods and services, which would result in higher costs or something else that needs to be looked into in more detail. 

To do so, you can take a look at the operating ratio and net profit margin development chart. These are the success indicators that will help you understand if your cost-optimization strategies are paying off. There, we can observe a positive development in previous months with a decrease in the last observed period. Again, this could either be expected or something to be alarmed. It is important to take a deeper look into the data to ensure no big insights remain untapped. 

If you are still feeling a bit lost about the KPIs shown in this example, let’s talk about them in detail below. 

• Variable expenses : These are costs that are directly related to a business’s production levels. Meaning they can increase or decrease regularly, hence, the name variable. They include costs such as raw materials, labor costs, distribution and shipping, packaging, and sales commissions, among others. It is important to note that variable expenses can not be compared to any other company as they vary from industry to industry. 
• Fixed expenses : As its name suggests, these are all expenses that need to be mandatorily paid every month, quarter, or year. They are not subjected to the production level but more to the functioning of the business. These include salaries, insurance, rent, and taxes, just to name a few. 
• Operating ratio : This KPI shows your operating expenses as a percentage of the total revenue. It shows the ability of an organization to keep costs low while generating revenue. This means the lower the ratio, the more profitable the organization is.

Weekly Financial Report Templates And KPIs

A weekly financial statement serves to help you monitor all your short-term financial activities in weekly increments. It should be created and reviewed each week and provides a comprehensive look at the short-term performance of your business.

Now we will take a look at some financial statements examples to get a clearer picture of what can be tracked in weekly intervals.

a) Operating Cash Receipts, Disbursements, Balance

Part of a business’s budgeting process may include cash receipts and disbursements, which use actual data for cash collection to design a budget or create income statements, for example. A sample financial report on a weekly basis can help companies gain insights from accurate reporting based on using cash receipts and disbursements. Metrics and KPIs can include:

Cash flow: indicates the changes in cash versus its fixed counterparts, such as exactly where cash is used or generated during the week.

• Operating activities: measures a business’s operating cash movements, whereby the net sum of operating cash flow is generated.
• Financing activities: tracks cash level changes from payments of interest and dividends or internal stock purchases.
• Investing activities: tracks cash changes derived from the sale or purchase of long-term investments, like property, for example.

Operating activities: indicated any activities within a business that affect cash flows, such as total sales of products within a weekly period, employee payments, or supplier payments.

• Direct method: This metric obtains data from cash receipts and cash disbursements related to operating activities. The sum of the two values = the operating cash flow (OCF).
• Indirect method: This metric uses the net income and adjusts items that were used to calculate the net income without impacting cash flow, therefore converting it to OCF.

Gross profit margin: This enables your business to measure and track the total revenue minus the cost of goods sold, divided by your total sales revenue.

• This KPI is a crucial measurement of production efficiency within your organization. Costs may include the price of labor and materials but exclude distribution and rent expenses.
• For example, if your gross profit margin were 30% last year, you would keep 30 cents out of every dollar earned and apply it towards administration, marketing, and other expenses. On a weekly basis, it makes sense to track this KPI in order to keep an eye on the development of your earnings, especially if you run short promotions to increase the number of purchases. Here is a visual example:

b) Any Generated Current Receivables

Weekly financial reports can help businesses stay on top of invoicing, billing procedures, cash basis of accounting, and accounting records, and ensure that they don’t fall behind on being paid for services and goods that are owed to them by customers or suppliers. Weekly report metrics and KPIs include:

• Days sales outstanding (DSO): This measures how fast your business collects money that you’re owed following a completed sale. DSO = (Accounts receivable/total credit sales) x number of days in the period.
• DSO vs. best possible DSO: Aligning these two numbers indicates the collection of debts in a timely fashion. Best possible days sales outstanding = (Current receivables x number of days in a week) / weekly credit sales.
• Average days delinquent: Indicates how efficient your business processes are in your ability to collect receivables on time. ADD= Days sales outstanding – Best possible days sales outstanding

Top Daily Financial Report Examples And KPIs

A daily financial report is a method to track the previous day’s activities that have an impact on your accounting status but are not necessarily a strict financial metric. It can keep you apprised of all the requisite data management used to track and measure potential errors, internal production, revenue loss, and receivables' status.

As we mentioned above, these ones provide a limited vision, but you can use the examples below to see how some daily actions on problematic factors can impact your final results.

a) Tracking Potential Staff Errors

Maintaining an efficient, productive work environment and ensuring that you can identify any employee discrepancies or issues is critical to being proactive about business growth. Monitoring employees working hours and productivity levels can help you detect potential staff errors quickly, control these errors, and avoid negative impacts on your financial results at the end of the day and, ultimately, the month.

Real-time management live dashboards offer clear visuals regarding employee management processes with the following metrics and KPIs:

Organizational performance: These are key metrics for tracking and evaluating some factors impacting your performance.

• Employee overtime: overtime per employee = total overtime hours / FTE
• Absenteeism: Number of employees absent today

Work quality: These metrics help companies determine the quality level of their employees’ work performance.

• Amount of errors
• Product defects

Work quantity: These metrics indicate employee performance related to quantity, such as sales figures or the number of codes a programmer can create in a given amount of time. Quantity does not, of course, mean quality, but on monitored daily, it can reveal bottlenecks or under-production problems.

• Sales numbers: the number of client contacts, the number of calls an employee makes, and the amount of active sales leads.
• Units produced: lines produced during coding, number of keys a nurse receptionist can hit per minute, etc.
• Customer handling time: how many customer calls are answered during a specific time period, for example.

b) Measure Revenue Loss & Receivables

By tracking staff errors, you can track the money it costs your company (having a problem in production, finding the problem, and fixing it), which will inevitably end up in your financial statements as the money you lost. Tracking revenue loss can be especially beneficial for those companies with customer accounts or recurring income. A daily record helps businesses quickly monitor revenue-related factors so that they can increase their earnings. Revenue loss can also originate from one-time purchases, customers who move to your competitor, or customers who move out of the area. Metrics used to measure these factors can include: 

Accounts receivable turnover ratio: This measures the number of times that your business is able to collect average accounts receivable and indicates your effectiveness in extending credits. Here is a visual example:

• A low accounts receivable turnover ratio basically indicates that you might need to revise your business's credit policies to collect payments more quickly.

Additional metrics you can monitor on a shorter time frame, such as daily, are as follows:

• Number of daily transactions
• Average gross margin
• The average cost per order

You can also be more specific about your revenue loss: categorizing where you lost what a good practice to identify which parts of your business management reporting practices have important room for improvement is. Tracking metrics like the top 10 products generating the most revenue or, on the contrary, the top 10 products generating the worse revenue will tell you a story about what needs more attention.

The revenue loss can also come from discounts or sales, for example. Monitoring on a daily basis which promotions are getting “too” popular can help you stop it before it generates more revenue loss than revenue growth that was supposed to create.

A daily, weekly, and monthly record help communicate the ongoing narrative of your company's economic processes, strategies, initiatives, and progress. As you can see, this form of an analytical report in the finance industry is an undeniably potent tool for ensuring your company’s internal as well as external financial activities are fluent, buoyant, and ever-evolving.

Why Do You Need Financial Reports?

We saw some powerful financial statement templates to empower your business, but before finishing our journey through these tools, we are going to show you some of the main ways in which your business could benefit from them. As we mentioned a few times through this article, interactive reports created with professional business analytics tools offer a clear snapshot of your business’s financial health, and they will give you the answers you need to plan strategies and tackle any issues that might arise with your finances. Here are the top 5 benefits. 

• Performance tracking: If you are a loyal reader of this blog, then you know the importance of relying on data for business success. By using modern financial performance reports, CFOs, and other relevant stakeholders can have a quick and accurate snapshot of all areas of a business. This will help them make more informed decision-making as well as plan strategies and forecast future results to find growth opportunities. 
• Mitigating errors: When we are talking about finances, every detail counts. Using inaccurate statements can not only damage your business’s profitability but can also expose it to legal issues if any discrepancies are found in your numbers. Many BI finance tools in the market ensure accurate reporting with the latest data available. This way, you will be able to constantly monitor the performance of your finances in every area and mitigate any errors before they become bigger issues.  
• Showing financial condition to investors and stakeholders: If you have investors or you are looking for potential ones to expand your business, then a report showing a snapshot of your business performance will be a fundamental tool. On one hand, it will help you show your investors where their money went and where it is now, and on the other, it will show potential new investors or other relevant stakeholders that your business is worth their money.
• Debt Management: As we mentioned in one of our examples of financial statements, wrong debt management can damage a business to the point of no return. Investing in innovative BI solutions to generate professional statements that contain a detailed balance sheet of your assets and liabilities can help you understand your liquidity and manage your debts accordingly.  
• Staying compliant with tax laws: Last but not least, one of the most important benefits of using finances reporting is to stay compliant with the law. No matter the size of your company, you have to pay taxes, and tax agents will use your financial documents to make sure you are paying your fair amount. By keeping track of this information in a professional financial status document, you will be able to reduce your tax burden and avoid any discrepancies in your numbers. 

Common Challenges Of Financial Statements

While these tools are fundamental to the growth and correct functioning of any type of organization that profits, it is still a hard process that has limitations. Being aware of the challenges coming your way can help you tackle them and be prepared to generate accurate financial statements. Let’s look at some of these limitations. 

• Manual work : Manual tasks are the enemy of a successful reporting process. Especially with finances, where you need to make important decisions all the time, the need for real-time reporting is critical. However, there are still many companies that build their statements manually, which means by the time it is ready, the data is no longer useful. With that issue in mind, several automated reporting tools have emerged to help mitigate the manual tasks and dedicate more time to actually analyzing.  
• Manage various data sources : Data quality is the basis of a successful reporting process. When it comes to generating finance reports, it is necessary to gather data from various sources, which can be a tedious job. The issue becomes even bigger when you want to process and unify all of this information for analysis. Luckily, modern management reporting tools allow you to connect various data sources and visualize them all together in interactive dashboards with just a few clicks.  
• Data literacy: Data literacy refers to the ability to understand, communicate and work with data. It represents a challenge for any reporting process, but especially when it comes to finances, as the numbers and concepts are more complex. To prevent literacy levels from becoming a bigger issue, it is recommended to assess the level of knowledge across employees and departments and provide financial and data-related training for anyone who needs it. This way, you’ll ensure everyone is on the same page and has the ability to integrate analytical practices into their daily operations. 
• Accessibility and collaboration : It is very likely that an organization’s financial goals will be linked across departments and teams. Achieving these goals successfully requires a level of collaboration that is harder to achieve, especially when it comes to sharing reports and building discussions around them. If these documents are not properly shared, it is very possible that discrepancies will be found in the strategies, and that can damage the end goal. To avoid this, organizations need to rely on analytical tools with an online environment that allows them to easily share relevant information among different stakeholders in a fast and efficient way.  
• Adapt to regulatory changes : Paired with the challenges coming with the data management process, there are also regulatory changes that happen all the time, and that can present a challenge for organizations. Businesses need to ensure their financial reports are rigorously complying with regulations as well as be flexible and responsive to any new changes that might arise. 
• Security : With cyberattacks and data breaches becoming an increasing concern for businesses, keeping financial data secure becomes a major challenge for organizations. To prevent your information from ending up in the wrong hands, it is necessary to implement various security measures such as access controls, password-protected reports, and other things.  

How To Make A Financial Report?

To create a comprehensive financial statement, you need to keep these points in mind:

1. Define your mission and audience

No matter if you're a small business or a large enterprise, you need to define your goals clearly and what you are trying to achieve with the report. This can help both internal and external stakeholders who are not familiarized with your company or finances. If you're creating an internal report just for the finances department, it would make sense to include financial jargon and data that, otherwise, would create challenges for external parties to follow.

By defining the mission and audience, you will know how to formulate the information that you need to present and how complex the jargon will be. Create a draft of the most important statements you want to make, and don't rush with this step. Take your time; the numbers, charts, and presentations come later.

2. Define goals and targets

Once you’ve defined your mission and the audience of your reports, it is time to set some goals and targets to use as benchmarks to measure the success of your financial strategies. This is an important step because goals help organizations plan their expected growth and improve based on that. 

That said, there are a few steps you should follow to ensure you are setting accurate objectives. For starters, your goals and targets should be long and short-term but, most importantly, attainable. Many businesses fail in their analytical efforts because they take industry benchmarks, for example, as the end goal for their own performance. Now, while industry values are good benchmarks and they shouldn’t be discarded entirely, they should still be looked at with a grain of salt. Be honest with yourself and with the current scenario of your business, and define targets that are realistic and attainable. Consider your budget, your business size, your historical performance, and other elements to build efficient goals that are measurable in time.  

3. Identify your metrics

In this step, you need to identify the key performance indicators that will represent the financial health of your company and help you measure the goals you defined in the previous step. Depending on the selected metrics, you will need to present the following:

Balance sheet: This displays a business’s financial status at the end of a certain time period. It offers an overview of a business’s liabilities , assets, and shareholder equity.

Income statement: This indicates the revenue a business earned over a certain period of time and shows a business’s profitability. It includes a net income equal to the revenues and gains minus the expenses and losses.

Cash flow statement: Details a business’s cash flows during certain time periods and indicates if a business made or lost cash during that period of time.

These financial statements will help you get started. Additionally, you might want to consider specific KPIs and their relations. Gross profit margin, operating profit margin, operating expense ratio, etc., all have different applications and uses in a relevant data story. Take your time to identify the ones you want to include in order to avoid multiple repeats afterward.

4. Choose the right visualizations

Continuing on our previous point, after specifying the financial statement and metrics you want to add, it's time to include visuals. This point is important since the average reader will struggle to digest raw data, especially if you work with large volumes of information.

The type of chart is important to consider since the visuals will immediately show the relationship, distribution,  composition, or comparison of data. Therefore, the type of charts will play a significant role in your reporting practice. Here is a visual overview that can help you identify which one to choose:

In the overview, we can see that scatter plots and bubble plots will work best in depicting the relationship of the data, while the column chart or histogram is the distribution of data. To learn more about a specific chart and details about each, we suggest you read our guide on the top 30 financial charts .

5. Apply design best practices 

By now, you have the planning of your report ready. The next step is to bring everything to life by generating the actual report. Choosing the right chart type is the first step, but there are other design best practices that should be followed to ensure the process is as efficient as possible. 

The first and most important best practice is to avoid overcrowding your reports. Putting too much information in them will make everything confusing and harder to understand, which can translate into poor strategic decisions for the future. Prioritize the most important KPIs that enable you to tell a story about your performance as well as some context to make sense of the information. Arrange your charts in a way that makes sense, and that helps the audience understand everything. 

Another important design best practice is to think carefully about colors. While it is very tempting to use a different color for every KPI, it is not recommended to do this. You should stick to only a few colors that are not too strong. You can even use different shades of the same color to differentiate data points, as you saw in our examples section. It is also a good practice to use your business’s color palette to make it more personalized and familiar to the audience. 

6. Use interactive features 

Traditionally, finance reporting has been a static practice that mainly contained outdated data that was not entirely valuable. As you’ve learned throughout this post, this is no longer the case. Today, these reports contain a mix of real-time and historical insights that enable decision-makers to extract insights and act on them as soon as they occur. Part of the success of this modern approach relies majorly on interactivity. That is why our next best practice or tip is to integrate interactive features into the process. 

Tools such as datapine offer a range of interactive functionalities to integrate into your financial reports. For instance, you can add different tabs with extra information and have it all together in a single report. This way, you’ll avoid overcrowding the report or having to generate multiple different ones. Plus, if you need to visit another tab quickly, you have the option to link that tab to a specific KPI and be transferred to it just by clicking on the chart. 

Another interactive feature that makes the reporting process way more efficient is drill downs and drill throughs. They basically enable users to go into lower or higher levels of data, respectively, without the need to jump into another chart. For example, if you are looking at revenue by country but want to dig deeper into a specific country, you can click on it, and the chart will adapt to show revenue by city of that country. The same thing can be done upwards to look at revenue by continent. 

7. Use modern software & tools

To be able to manage all your finance reports effectively, you will need professional tools. The traditional way of reporting through countless spreadsheets no longer serves its purpose since, with each export, you manage historical data and don't have access to real-time insights. The power of a modern dashboard builder lies within the opportunity to access insights on the go, in real-time, and with refreshing intervals that you can set based on your needs.

Moreover, professional dashboard software comes with built-in templates and interactivity levels that traditional tools cannot recreate or offer in such simplicity but, at the same time, a complexity that will make your report more informative, digestible, and, ultimately, cost-effective.

To manage financing performance in comparison to a set target, you can also use a modern KPI scorecard . That way, you will not only monitor your performance but see where you stand against your goals and objectives.

8. Automate your financial management report

Automation plays a vital role in today's creation of company financial reports. With traditional reporting, automation within the application is not quite possible, and in those scenarios, professionals usually lose a lot of time since each week, month, quarter, or year, the report needs to be created manually. Automation, on the other hand, enables users to focus on other tasks since the software updates the report automatically and leaves countless hours of free time that can be used for other important tasks.

For example, you can schedule your financial statement report on a daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly basis and send it to the selected recipients automatically. Moreover, you can share your dashboard or select certain viewers that have access only to the filters you have assigned. Finally, an embedded option will enable you to customize your dashboards and reports within your own application and white label based on your branding requirements. You can learn more about this point in our article, where we explain in detail the usage and benefits of professional white label BI and embedded analytics.

9. Stay Compliant

We already mentioned the regulatory side of financial reporting a couple of times throughout this post, but it is such an important step that we could not leave it out of this list. That is because companies that fail to meet the governmental requirements for their finance statements can face critical consequences that will throw all other efforts down the drain. 

In this sense, there are different requirements depending on the country or continent. In the USA, companies need to adhere to the GAAP guidelines, which basically provide a set of rules and standards for entities to prepare their reporting in a consistent and transparent way.  On the other side, countries from the EU need to follow the IFRS rules. Which obligates listed companies to follow a set of rules to prepare their statements. The IFRS guidelines provide a common language used by more than 100 countries. Through that, UE regulators can compare organizations across “international boundaries.”

10. Learn from the process

This might sound like an obvious step, but it is often overlooked. Once you are done generating your financial report, you should gather internal feedback from employees and any other relevant users and learn from the process. There is no secret recipe for the perfect finance report. Each company has different needs and resources. Therefore, tweaking little details to make the process efficient and easier for everyone involved can reap significant rewards in the future.  

As you’ve learned through this list of best practices, these tools are more digestible when they are generated through online data visualization tools that have numerous interactive dashboard features to ensure that your business has the right meaningful financial data. Finally, these statements will give your business the ability to:

• Track your revenue, expenses, and profitability.
• Make predictions based on trusted data.
• Plan out your budget more effectively.
• Improve the performance of your processes.
• Create fully customizable reports.

Comprehensive Reports For The Complete Financial Story Of Your Business

We’ve explained how to write a financial report, examined the dynamics of a monthly, daily, and weekly report templates, and explored examples relating to specific areas of the business with their related KPIs as well as some key benefits. Now, it’s time to look at the concept as a whole.

Financial reporting practices help your business obtain a clear, comprehensive overview of where your company is at and where you should plan on going. When augmented with crisp, easy-to-read visualizations in the form of financial dashboards , your business can quickly comprehend and accurately measure critical components of your status over specified time periods.

A financial statement template, as we presented above, can also help you answer critical questions, such as What can your business do with an extra $500k in cash? Will you be able to borrow less money, invest in new technology, or hire trained personnel to improve your sales?

Using datapine’s seamless software, your business will be able to see the full financial story of your company come to life and have a better grasp of your future path.

When it comes to your business’s finances, shooting in the dark or using antiquated methods of analysis or measurement will not only stunt your organizational growth but could lead to mistakes, errors, or inefficiencies that will prove detrimental to the health of your business. Data-driven dashboard reporting is the way forward, and if you embrace its power today, you’ll reap great rewards tomorrow and long into the future.

Do you want to improve your business’s financial health today? Try our 14-day trial completely free!

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3 money moves to make in your 30s to set yourself up for financial success

Your 30s are a decade often marked by big financial steps, from buying your first home to switching jobs to saving for future children.

With more working years under your belt, you're likely making more money than you did in your 20s — but it can still be confusing to know exactly what you should be doing with it to set yourself up for financial success into your 40s and beyond. 

Here are three smart things to do with your cash as a thirtysomething, according to two certified financial planners.

1. Continue eliminating debt

While paying off debt should also be a focus for those in their 20s, you could be even better positioned in your 30s to focus on tackling outstanding payments, because you're likely making more money, says Andrew Fincher, a CFP and financial advisor at VLP Financial Advisors. 

"When you're in your 30s and you have the ability to pay down more, that's a great time frame to really try to not have that debt extended into your 40s," he says.

2. Consider opening a 529 account

If you have or plan on having children, your 30s are a good time to think about opening a 529 college savings account to fund their future education — especially given that the average cost of college in the U.S. is over $36,000 per year and growing.

A 529 plan is a tax-advantaged savings account sponsored and operated by all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Earnings and withdrawals from a 529 are tax-free if they are used for qualified education expenses.

If you open a 529 account when your child is born, you'll have around 18 years to save and grow your investments, says Fincher. Doing so will make it less likely that your kid will have to worry about student debt when they're older.

State tax deductions for 529 contributions also make these college savings plans appealing, though every state is different. Maximum contribution limits also vary by state, ranging from $235,000 to $529,000, according to NerdWallet .

3. Boost your retirement savings

Your 30s are a great time to make sure your retirement savings are on track, and to potentially boost them.

If your employer offers a 401(k) match, where it contributes money to the 401(k) based on how much you put in, make sure you're maximizing it.

"Look at trying to improve [your company retirement plan]," says says Joe Conroy, CFP and author of "Decades & Decisions: Financial Planning At Any Age."

"Maybe save 1% more every year for a couple of years to pump up your savings and get it to a better rate," Conroy adds.

If you didn't put a retirement plan in place in your 20s, it's crucial to make up for lost time in your 30s. If your employer doesn't offer a 401(k) or similar type of plan, you can open an individual retirement account on your own.

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Handbook: Climate risk in the financial statements

Handbook | February 2024

Our in-depth guide comprises a collection of questions, issues and examples that we believe are relevant for companies thinking about the ways in which climate risk can affect their financial statements.

This February 2024 edition includes updated guidance on lease accounting for renewable energy contracts and an expanded discussion about tax credits under the IRA and CHIPS Acts of 2022.

Applicability

• All entities

Relevant dates

• Effective immediately

Continued focus on climate risk

Voluntary sustainability reporting is giving way to mandatory reporting. The International Sustainability Standards Board and the European Union have issued standards that set the foundation for global sustainability reporting, and the SEC is expected to finalize its climate rule in the near term.

Whichever framework is applied, climate reporting is at the forefront; with metrics and narrative that provide greater visibility into a company’s actions, plans and prospects. The picture those disclosures paint – and how it connects to a company’s financial position and performance – is coming under increasing scrutiny.

At the same time, as emissions reduction target dates get closer and as intentions change to strategies and then to actions, the potential effects on the financial statements are becoming more apparent. The volume and ingenuity of transactions linked to emissions reductions continue to increase – with the FASB expected to issue a proposal on accounting for environmental credit programs in the coming months.

These and other emissions-related transactions are testing the application of US GAAP in cases where there might not be explicit guidance, and leaving the finance function to develop processes and controls to help it monitor the financial reporting implications of the organization’s sustainability initiatives.

With the growing awareness of the implications of climate risk for the preparation of financial statements, we hope this latest edition of our US GAAP handbook will help you prepare. Ask yourself the questions that we pose, create your own checklist, and monitor your environment and circumstances.

Report contents

• About climate risk
• Long-lived assets
• Research and development
• Impairment of nonfinancial assets
• Financial instruments
• Power purchase agreements
• Contingencies and insurance
• Revenue and inventories
• Compensation and benefits
• Income taxes and related incentives
• Carbon credits
• Acquisitions and restructuring
• Fair value measurement and projections
• Presentation and disclosure

Download the document:

Climate risk in the financial statements

Executive summary

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Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) reporting

KPMG guidance and articles for financial reporting professionals.

Continued climate disclosure focus by SEC staff

Pending a final climate rule, the SEC staff continues to question issuers’ climate disclosures under existing rules.

Climate Change / Financial Reporting

Resource centre on the financial reporting impacts of climate change.

Unlock ESG opportunities to enhance trust, mitigate risk and create new value, starting now.

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