Time to breathe - and think ahead
⏲ Read time: 2 minutes
At this time of year, when the annual report is done and Q1 has been published, it's easy to breathe a sigh of relief. But it's precisely now — while the lessons from this year's process are still fresh — that the conditions are at their best for planning something better.
Time, money, and trust are at stake
At many companies, financial reporting takes up an unreasonable amount of time, with duplicated work, proofreading, and late changes making a mess of things. On top of that comes a costly reliance on external resources to set the layout, tables, and charts. This eats into both the budget and internal efficiency — and sometimes into morale as well. Every manual intervention at the eleventh hour is a potential source of error. When data is moved between different documents under time pressure, the risk grows that incorrect figures will find their way all the way to publication, which can be devastating for trust.
To minimise these risks, you need a single source of truth and an architecture in which data and design are kept separate. It's thanks to these principles that our clients report how OnlineReports gives them a far more manageable working life — by reducing the administrative workload and lowering external costs, while minimising the risk of manual errors by letting the platform pull data directly from verified source files.
The foundation for this is the web-based way of working and the direct integration with the company's existing master Excel. Data is retrieved automatically from the master files, and text variables also mean that figures within running text can be updated automatically when the underlying data changes — eliminating a common source of error: the gap between the tables and the body text.
The report is written for humans but read by machines
There's a further dimension that is rapidly changing the playing field: who — or what — reads the reports. Brunswick's 2026 U.S. Investor Survey shows that more than half of institutional investors now use AI as an integral part of their investment analysis, and two in three say AI has changed how they work with reports and earnings calls. The report's conclusion is clear: companies must increasingly communicate for both humans and machines.
A recent academic study from HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management, USTP – University of Applied Sciences St. Pölten, and nexxar shows exactly what this means in practice. Companies that publish their reports in HTML are cited three times as often by AI tools as companies that publish only in PDF. What's more, content in HTML format generates considerably more accurate AI responses than PDF archives, minimising the risk that the market bases its decisions on incorrect external information.
OnlineReports puts HTML first — the format in which AI models move entirely unhindered. This minimises the risk of digital noise and ensures that the information reaches the algorithms that have, in a short space of time, become a primary source for research and investment analysis.
