What is an annual report?

An annual report is a published document given to shareholders by public corporations as an official disclosure of their financial performance. It allows the shareholders to assess the success of the organization.

How is a Government annual report different?

Government Departments, agencies and other bodies, are also required to produce annual reports. These include the financials but also, more importantly, report on how well the organizations are achieving specific objectives as well as meeting the broader, whole-of-Government objectives such as energy saving, waste reduction, anti-discrimination, etcetera.

It allows the Minister (and the public) to assess a Department’s achievements using key performance indicators to determine whether it has met its objectives.

What are key performance indicators?

To make reporting open and transparent many organizations use key performance indicators – measurements developed specifically to measure organizations’ strategic performance.

These are very important in the Government sector because, lacking in profit measurements, there is a need for alternative measures of an organisation’s success.

How do you normally write a Government annual report?

In a Government department if you get nominated to do the annual report:

• you ask all the senior people in the organization to report on their divisional performance;

• you chase these people for weeks;

• you get their material;

• you edit it into a compliant format;

• write the Director General’s introduction;

• you give it back to the authors for corrections and amendments;

• you chase the same people for several more weeks;

• when you get their comments you edit it again;

• you submit it for approval;

• make even more corrections; and

• then send it off to be published with about a day to spare before it has to be presented to Parliament.

For this you make no friends, get no plaudits, and when you are finished you go back to your old job and try to catch up. The only hoped-for benefit is that since you have done your turn the following year someone else will get the job.

How do you want to do your annual report?

You outsource. With a decade of experience and half a dozen different organizations’ reports completed, Madrigal Communications can produce clear and accurate annual reports.

Madrigal Communication’s Director, Tim Entwisle, has many years of senior experience in the Government sector and understands the complexity of Government performance reporting. We will edit the most complicated and difficult prose into coherent and attractive plain English.