Define your goals clearly

All team members must understand the purpose and goals of their work. That enable them to navigate through obstacles and enables them to add more value by developing ideas how to reach your goals.

Make sure you provide clarity on what needs to be done, when it needs to be done, and what success in your opinion looks like.

Tell a story!

Communication is key! Try to understand your target audience and what is important for them! Ask your audience questions about their daily obstacles and challenges.

Use communication skills to explain the reports to your colleagues, always keeping in mind that they need to understand what to change, maintain or omit in their business.

Communicate in a simple way. Finance and controlling are not complicated, the way it is taught and told is complicated.

If you are the owner of the company, make sure that your employees understand what your goals are, and how the numbers in the reports contribute to your business plan. Align reports with the entire company strategy – focus on that.

Finance reports should focus on simplifying the finance topics. Finance and reporting trainings should be fun and interactive. Choose examples from “real life” to bring finance closer to your employees or colleagues.

Simplify

Simplify and take out the complexity. Take out anything, which is not serving you to reach your goals and to fulfill your business plan. But how? Here are some ways to simplify within your company.

Be aware that there is a huge difference between activity and productivity. Just a small reminder! That topic is for later. Let's focus on how you could take out the complexity within your company.

Prioritize

First, prioritize your goals, if you have not done that already setting up your business plan last year.

To prioritize is almost an overused word in my option and to make it worse priorities are used in the plural.

Originally priority only existed in the singular, which totally makes

Tired of boring reports?

Less is more!

Think about your company goals for example - do you have certain KPI's to track your progress? KPI's are Key Performance Indicators, so they are key to track your company's progress. Place them for example on the left upper side on your reporting page.

Tell a story with your report!

Most people can be attracted to a report when it is presented like a story. There are three types of information available: context, content, and meaning.