Divisional Reporting

What is Divisional Reporting?

All financial documents or other files containing information about the historic financial and operational performance of individual divisions within the company.

Divisional reporting refers to the level of detail provided with regard to the financial performance of your company’s divisions. Specific issues to address include:

• The existence of separate financial metrics for each major division within the firm
• The way in which divisional earnings are grouped, for example by product, geography, or customer base
• The extent to which financial metrics are available for each division under this analysis

Why is Divisional Reporting important for business today?

Getting each of your business units to report critical financial metrics separately helps you to:

• Have greater insight into the results of each product or division within your company provides a deeper understanding of the health and performance of your business
• Develop unique strategies for each of those divisions or products and then track the performance of those initiatives over time
• Ensure investment capital can also be put toward the most profitable products and divisions first and exposures to poorer performing areas can be reviewed independently

Why is Divisional Reporting important for an event tomorrow?

All investors are looking to assess the strategic position of the business across many factors including forecast growth, profitability, capital intensity, volatility in earnings, market position and barriers to entry.

But most businesses could divide their business up across geographies and customer segments. Investors know that their assessment are likely to vary considerably across each business division.

Investors will often perform an analysis on the business by looking at each division individually. This analysis is almost impossible without key financial metrics being reported separately for each division they wish to assess. If they can perform this analysis efficiently it will deepen their understanding of the business and greatly increase the confidence they have in entering into any transaction.

Pros of addressing Divisional Reporting

• Provides deeper insight into the performance of the business
• Facilitates the efficient allocation of capital
• Enables unique strategies to be developed and tracked for each product or division
• Poorer performing divisions can be reviewed in greater detail to identify underlying issues

Cons of not addressing this topic

• True health of the business may be more difficult to ascertain
• Poorer performing products or divisions my not be readily identified let alone thoroughly reviewed