This year Flow won three tenders to prepare annual reports for clients in the tourism sector: the Cradle of Humankind/Dinokeng, South African Tourism and Gauteng Tourism.
As clients, editors, designers and printers will attest, working on an annual report is a comprehensive, time-consuming and attention-to-detail undertaking for everyone involved.
Flow’s role is to streamline and manage the process in order to produce a professional end product by the stipulated deadline. The number of annual reports produced by Flow has doubled since 2014, with clients choosing Flow for our writing and editing skills, accuracy, consistency, design and presentation.
“Being able to take an annual report from raw content to printed product gives Flow an edge, as it is convenient for the client to have everything managed by a single service provider,” says project manager Ros Caboz.
Flow’s role starts with conceptualising the design, informed by the client’s corporate identity, and providing sample pages for the client to approve the “look and feel” of the report.
At the same time as the design team is working towards a suitable look, the content is being meticulously edited in the writing studio to create a report that is grammatically correct, consistent in terms of tone, style and flow, and easy to read and comprehend.
“The financials is the final element that we integrate into the report as figures need to be audited and approved up to the last minute,” says Ros.
Once the design concept and content revisions have been approved, the two elements are married and the layout process begins. This stage involves numerous reverts, adding in the financials – which may be up to 30 pages long – and getting final sign-off from the client.
By law, annual reports by these three entities are required to be signed off by the South African Auditor-General before going to the printers for a proof copy to be made.
At proof stage the report is again thoroughly checked and signed off by client, before the final print run proceeds.
“The entire process takes around three months, but if there are additional requirements such as photography for instance, it may take longer.
“Our clients are provided with a high-quality print product that is professionally bound and laminated. Since many annual reports are presented to provincial legislature or to Parliament, Flow also provides clients with DVD copies of their report,” says Ros.
Practical advice from Ros to prospective clients when planning their annual reports is to organise for professional photographs to be taken of the entire board and of individual board members when the board meets at the start of each year.
“There is not always a full board meeting at the time of year when the report is being put together, so it is often challenging to get photographs of the relevant board members and this may cause unnecessary delays,” she adds.
Here’s some advice for when it’s time to start working on your company’s annual report:
- Ensure that everyone who needs to approve the look and feel of the report does so by the deadline so content does not have to be revised at a later stage
- Keep everyone involved informed on progress and deadlines
- When planning your timeline, make allowance for delays and unforeseen interruptions
- Where possible, give the report a single “voice” since the entire document should read as if it has been written by one person
- When queries are raised by editors, endeavour to address these as soon as possible to prevent unnecessary delays
- Once the editors have applied edits to the report, don’t “correct” the content during the approval process – rather raise any issues you may have with them
- The best approach when dealing with an annual report is to collate all the information and present it to the project team as a single unit, rather than providing it in bits and pieces from different sources. Doing so will make it much quicker and easier to edit and bits won't fall through the cracks
If simple procedures are followed and everyone involved is kept in the loop, an annual report need never again be the bane of your life, irrespective of your chosen service provider.
