By fneedle@hubspot.com (Flori Needle)

An annual report offers a comprehensive overview of your business’s yearly operations. As the content in these reports is heavy-hitting, it’s essential to present it in a way that helps your audience understand and visualize your successes.

These reports also incorporate various design elements that support your metrics and create a unique, creative, and visually appealing story of your business activities.

In this post, we’ll outline annual report design best-practices, provide a template you can use to create your own, and go over examples of annual reports from other businesses that you can use for inspiration.

What is an annual report?

As a refresher, an annual report is a document created by businesses that display yearly performance, including successes and challenges. It gives a big-picture view of operations and strategies while also going in-depth on key performance metrics.

Annual reports differ from weekly reports in that they address anything and everything that has happened over the past year, including content you’ve already mentioned in weekly, monthly, or any other style of report you’ve made.

Designing an annual report is a careful process, as it is crucial to find a balance between powerful graphics and clarity and understanding. Most reports contain data visualizations, like charts and graphs, to enhance the experience and really call attention to heavy-hitting metrics.

Below we’ll provide a template that you can use to design an annual report for your business and outline the sections that should be included in every report, regardless of industry.

Annual Report Design Template

The template you choose to use to design your annual report should be based on your individual business needs and the metrics you’re hoping to include.

However, you can adapt most templates to fit your business needs, like this template offered by HubSpot. The image below features two pages from the downloadable template, including a company overview and a yearly performance analysis.

Image Source

The template allows you to go in-depth into aspects of your business that the annual report will discuss, whether it’s marketing campaigns or yearly sales performance. Despite this, there are specific elements that should be included in all annual reports, and we’ll discuss those below.

1. Summarize your yearly goals and strategies.

The first section of your annual report should summarize your yearly goals and strategies. This provides your audience with an overview of your annual focus and gives the information necessary to understand and contextualize the rest of your report.

Essentially, it sets the tone for the rest of the report as it explains the intention behind your operations. If you’re a marketing business creating an annual report, this section could outline your marketing goals and the campaigns you created to reach those goals.

2. Outline key performance indicators (KPIs) and objectives.

Another portion of your annual report should outline the KPIs you used to measure successes. This section is truly the heart of your report, as you’re displaying the results …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog

Author: Aaron