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Take a fresh look at the reports being sent out. Are some being generated just because that is the way it has always been done? Are they really necessary?

Of course, the trick is deciding what reports to keep and what reports to scrap. Often, you can do this by deciding yourself what reports to send to management, instead of having management decide. They often do not know what they want, so they just ask for everything.

“We scrapped some old reports we were doing just because they had always been done,” says an accounting manager at a manufacturing company (75 em-ployees). “Finance decided which direction to point them in. We began to develop easier-to-use reports, and we also began focusing on support functions, such as lo-gistics and customer service, as a way of improving the bottom line.”

As discussed above, the emphasis should be on reporting matters that are most controllable. Also, the way revenues and expenses are reported and analyzed can make a big difference. “We divided our product lines into subcategories and tracked gross profit. That has really magnified products that may need to be discontinued or should be promoted to a greater extent,” says a controller of a training materials supplier