How to speed up the annual report
⏲ Read time: 1 minute
Ask anyone who has just finished producing an annual report where the time went, and the answer is rarely the writing. The text is usually ready in good time. What burns hours and drains patience is the work around it: waiting for figures, manually reconciling tables with the body text, messy version control and repeated rounds of proofreading on material that has already changed.
The time savings therefore rarely lie in the writing itself, but in how the work is organised.
Where the time actually goes
A concrete example: net sales are adjusted late in the year-end closing. Changing the figure itself takes ten seconds. But the same figure appears in the income statement, the segment note, the five-year summary, two charts, the CEO's statement and a sentence about margin development in the board of directors' report. The change is trivial. Making sure every instance has been updated often is not, and that check is what costs time.
Then there are parallel versions. When finance, sustainability, IR and communications work in separate files that later have to be merged, there comes a point where someone has to decide manually which text is the current one. That step is time-consuming and also one of the most common sources of error.
A third time thief is proofreading done too early. Reading through a text where the figures are not yet locked means the work has to be done again. It is not unusual for the same material to be proofread three times without any noticeable improvement in quality.
Two principles are key to cleaning up this process:
- Establish a single, unified data source (a single source of truth)
- An architecture where data and design are kept separate
A unified production environment
In a traditional PDF-driven process, it takes military discipline to keep the layout from breaking when changes are made late. With OnlineReports, that limitation disappears. Instead of making the manual checks more efficient, they are eliminated from the process.
Figures are taken directly from the company's master Excel file, and tables and charts are generated automatically. Through text variables, the figures in the body text are also updated the moment the underlying data changes, in every language. Because the visual identity is built into the system's templates, visual consistency is maintained. A new subtotal or an added text section adapts automatically to the layout, without a spread having to be redrawn or breaking.
The result? A process where the finance function no longer has to act as a manual database, and where late changes can be handled without disrupting the entire process.
