5 Reports Every Business in Bangladesh Must Focus On

Business reports are vital as they tell you your business’s health at any time. These reports also help you make the right business decisions at the right time, improving your profitability, efficiency, and visibility. Whether your business is in Bangladesh or elsewhere, we have listed five most important business reports every business owner must review.

5 critical business reports for your business

All business owners must be mindful of these five key business reports and know what they contain.

1.      Accounting reports

Accounting is one of the most important areas of your business, as it deals with your payments/receipts. The two main types of accounting reports are:

• Outstanding payables

You may have many creditors in your business, and each may have different payment terms and due dates. Missing these payments may result in penalties or exorbitant interest rates.

Therefore, you should run your outstanding account payables report regularly. The report gives you a list of all your business creditors and outstanding payment dues to them. This report lets you track your expenses properly and always pay the dues within the deadline.

• Outstanding receivables

This report gives you a list of your debtors—people who owe you money. This report will provide information on the amounts due from different people to your business. You can then track and recover money from your debtors to avoid bad debts.

2.      Inventory reports

Inventory management is one of the important yardsticks for measuring your business’s success. Customer satisfaction and the reputation of your business depend wholly on your ability to fulfil all your customer orders every time successfully. Here are a few reports to help you manage inventory effectively and avoid stock-out or excessive stock issues.

• Stock summary

This report gives you a detailed stock analysis on the day you generate it. Apart from providing a detailed breakdown of your stock summary for a particular day, this report also gives you information on the stock you bought or sold on that day.

• Stock ageing

What type of stock do you have in your warehouses? Which stocks should you use first? What type of stock has a long shelf life? Which stock has already reached the expiration date or are past expiry? A stock ageing report gives you answers to these questions. This report lets you manage your inventory effectively and reduce your carrying costs.

• Warehouse summary

This is a straightforward report that presents all the inventory details of different warehouses. By knowing the quantity and quality of your inventory at all your warehouses at any given point, you can plan for better distribution of your goods.

• Reorder status

This report is significant because it gives information on the net stock available in different warehouses and the number of pending sales orders. This way, you can understand if a particular stock has reached its critical limit. If yes, you can quickly reorder the same to avoid stock-out issues.

• Movement analysis

This report details the fast-moving and slow-moving stock in your warehouses. Thus, you can devise strategies to eliminate the slow-moving stock quickly and cut down on your warehouse and carrying costs.

3.      Financial reports

Financial reports tell you the health of your business and let you know if you are making a profit. These are vital reports for yourself, your investors, shareholders, and all other stakeholders. The three most important financial reports that any business should focus on are:

• Trial balance

A trial balance forms the basis for a company’s profit and loss account and balance sheet. This report ensures that your debit and credit balances are always reconciled for any given period.

• Profit and loss statement

Also known as the income statement, this report tells you the net profit/net loss your business makes for a given period. You can get more loans and investments for growth opportunities only if you continuously report a net profit in this report.

• Balance sheet

A balance sheet shows your assets and liabilities. Any investor would look at this report before deciding to associate with you. This report gives information like your current and fixed assets, shareholders’ equity (in the case of public limited companies), and other liabilities.

4.      Management control reports

These reports are the ones that help the management make critical business decisions about the future of the business. The main types of management control reports are:

• Budget variance

This report compares the budget vs actual expenditure and tells if you went overboard or spent under the budget limit. With this report as the base, you can make future projections for your business.

• Cash flow projection

This report tells you your future cash flow position. What are your forecasted figures for a given period? Will you have enough cash for that period to meet these forecasts? How much money can your business generate during this period? This report answers these questions.

5.      Marketing Report

This report plays an essential role in your sales forecasts. It tells you which market is doing well and vice versa. It gives you a comparative study between your marketing expenses and the actual sales for a specific market. A few marketing reports include:

• Industry trends

This report analyses the industry trends that are prevalent in your market. For example, use of AI for business operations like manufacturing, content creation, etc., is a powerful industry trend that many businesses are investing in.  

• User experience report

User experience is key to gaining customer loyalty and attracting new customers to your product. A user experience report will signify observations like what customers thought about the onboarding experience, can customers find support easily for their queries, was the customer happy with the product varieties, etc.

Conclusion

Every business should use its accounting/business software to prepare key reports whenever it wants. Software like TallyPrime has sophisticated and robust tools that help you with critical details about your business, such as:

• Detailed overview of a particular department of your business
• Identification of key issues at an early stage
• Understanding the scope for growth in any department and more