Advivo highlights that monthly reporting is key to business growth, tracking essential KPIs, ensuring accountability, and enabling strategic decisions through regular, action-driven meetings.
A lot is written in forums, LinkedIn articles, and other mediums on what should and shouldn’t be included in monthly reporting packages. The content is less important – what is most important is to have regularly scheduled meetings, and have meaningful, open, honest, and frank discussions. The reporting package should largely be acting as an agenda to address positive or negative trends, key business metrics and drivers of the business, both financial and non-financial leading and lagging indicators, and holding people accountable for what they said they were going to do “but didn’t have enough time to address.” Everyone in small business is time-poor, that is why we need these structured meetings to spend some time on the business not just in the business, follow through on strategic objectives and not just be bogged down in operational issues. Each meeting should have action items and time frames, and meeting time needs to hold people accountable for time frames, follow-ups, and staying on track.
Documentation with Graphical Interface
There needs to be documentation, and ideally, it should have some graphical interfaces, not just words and numbers, that highlight in a quick, easily referenced format how the business is performing against key KPIs. We use a wheel with red and green colours. Different businesses and different levels of maturity, industry, etc. will dictate how the KPIs should be customised for the business. For example childcare & accommodation, you must be monitoring occupancy rates, whereas production companies are looking at production time and time wastage for logistics, inputs, etc so all businesses are different.
Financially, you will need to look at free cash flow, profit and loss, and balance sheet management, including debtors and creditors. Tracking month-by-month and year-to-date helps keep you on top and smooth seasonal variations. It is also useful to look at the same time last year in a 13-month rolling P&L.
Cash Flow Management
The management of cash flow is key, and that includes monitoring the value and days of stock and debtors aging. Also, if your business has a large work in progress that needs to be monitored, it can easily become a black hole.
No business survives without sales monitoring, and understanding your sales pipeline, call, and conversion rate is imperative.
Key People Should Attend the Meetings
Another key issue is who should attend the meeting. I would suggest if key people are responsible for various aspects of the business, then they should attend, and it always helps if they understand how all parts of the business work and need to work together. That way, if the reporting is identifying trends, you can discuss why and what might need to be done about it straight away and get whole-team input as required.
