We prefer to call them a business review, which is a better description of what they are – they’re not compulsory but this is a benefit as it allows them to be completely customised to your business to give you the insights you want about your business.
They form a financial report to be used by the owners and management to aid them in their day to day decisions along with planning for the future. They’re usually produced monthly or quarterly. It’s important to make sure they only contain the information you want to see, we’d be happy to advise what kind of information people usually like to see and this can be tweaked from report to report to ensure they are giving you the insights you want, otherwise you probably won’t actually read them!
Most to start with will contain a summary of your accounts, profit & loss and your balance sheet. As your business develops you’ll want to add more detail in, such as debtors and creditors, budgets and cashflow analysis, plus comparisons to previous periods to see how your growth is going.
So why not do this yourself? All this information is available within your bookkeeping software so you could but it comes down to time – it’s not just a simple click and it’s there for you to read, the information you actually want will often be spread over a number of reports and need to be collated together so you’ll need to decide if it is time well spent for you to create these yourself.
If you’ve never had management accounts before we’d be happy to discuss them with you to see if we feel they’d help you within your business, just get in touch to arrange an informal chat.
