Conducting quarterly and yearly reviews for your company can help you determine where you are now, what needs to be addressed, and whether you are on track to meet your goals. To conduct a proper review, you must review reports from your departments and evaluate that information. These reports will include financial statements such as balance sheets and sales numbers but should also have security, marketing and personnel reports.
Data Security and User Access
When performing a user access review, it is crucial to have a solid data security and user access policy in place. While your company’s security is not solely focused on data security, knowing who has access to your data, from where and how often is a big part of reviewing your company’s performance. This means you should check your policies and procedures around data security and what your user access looks like. This policy helps guide your IT department on what to look for during the review and can help smooth hard feelings when someone’s access is restricted during or after the inspection.
Sales and Revenue
Knowing how much product you have sold and what money you are getting from various revenue streams is crucial to evaluating your company’s direction for the last quarter and pinpointing areas to improve for the next one. While this report is closely tied to marketing and balance sheets, it is ultimately a closer look at which products and services performed best and worst.
Inventory and Balance Sheet
Your balance sheet covers your equity, assets and liabilities. This gives you a better overall idea of how fluid your working capital is and how easily you can qualify for financing when needed. It will also let you know whether you are running a deficit, how big it is, and what line items can be addressed to solve it. Your inventory is listed on your balance sheet as part of your assets, but an inventory report is more than just a total number of items or the full value of assets. This report will let you know which things are quickly moving off your shelves and which are just taking up space. It can also review your accounts payable and accounts receivable and how the cash flows within and through your company.
Marketing and Customer Loyalty
A marketing report includes the amount spent on marketing campaigns, how those programs worked and what trends you should follow. It can also report on customer loyalty and help you understand how many potential sales you have at which stage of the marketing funnel. However, customer loyalty can also be a separate and more detailed report. These documents will help you review your marketing budget, determine how many repeat sales you can expect in the next quarter and give you a better idea of the ROI of your marketing and sales initiatives.
Personnel and Human Resources
Your personnel and HR report will include employee retention, new hires and terminations for the last quarter. It will also inform your IT department on which access permissions need to be updated and should include an evaluation of critical policies and procedures. For instance, if multiple sexual harassment complaints have been made, but you do not have a policy covering that behavior, an HR report will prompt you to draft one.
Website Traffic and Social Media
In addition to your marketing and sales reports, you will want to review your website and social media performance over the last quarter. This information should include the number of followers your accounts have, how much engagement is seen on each platform, and your website traffic numbers. You will also want to know how many visits to your site resulted in a sale, the average time spent on the site by each visitor, and which bugs were addressed.
There are a lot of different reports you will need for a proper quarterly business review. Still, the effort put into this review will significantly impact how your company functions in the future.
