I have just finished another Toolkit. It is called “How to write a finance report that people read and leads to a “Yes” – Guidelines, rules, and one page E-templates to get your report over the line. This is an extract from it.

There is a healthy and unhealthy way of reporting progress. I’ll never forget the weekly meetings I attended while working for the finance team at BP oil. The financial controller would ask us, in turn, what had we done last week and maybe if we got round to it, what were our plans for the following week. Not only was it a boring session it was incredibly stressful, particularly if you had a bad week and had not made much progress.

I firmly believe progress updates should not be held in a team setting. It’s the job of your manager to free up time to do a one-to-one with you once a fortnight. That is the sweet spot. We all can have a bad week but normally we compensate it with a catch up in the following week and therefore the reporting progress to your boss is a lot less stressful.

Team briefings should definitely be stand up scrum meetings and in peak periods such as month end reporting you should scrum every day and each person who stands up is simply got to say, what they did yesterday, what are they going to do today, and what road blocks are in their way regarding the month end reporting process.

I recently designed this report to help my daughter report progress to her manager.

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This is an extract from a Toolkit called “How to write a finance report that people read and leads to a “Yes” – Guidelines, rules, and one page E-templates to get your report over the line.