Enhanced business reporting: providing relevant information for decision makers.

• Author: Boudreaux, Caroline

How are most successful businesses managed today? Are historical financial statements or budgets the sole sources of data and information upon which critical decisions are formulated? Enhanced business reporting may change the way companies provide information.

**********

Adept organizations use historical information, along with predictive, real-time indicators to manage their day-to-day operations and make strategic decisions.

If organizations were managed solely on historical information, the result would be a tremendous loss of opportunity. Fortunately, technology provides access to timely, accurate and relevant information in a cost-efficient manner for virtually all entities.

Enhanced business reporting (EBR) addresses the need for better, more structured guidance on how to report information. EBR provides a model that incorporates both financial and nonfinancial data, including leading indicators, rather than a snapshot based primarily on financial, historical or lagging information.

A strategic partner of the AICPA, the new Enhanced Business Reporting Consortium (EBRC)--www.ebr360.org--is leading the effort to improve the quality, integrity and transparency of information in a cost-effective and time-efficient manner.

EBRC members will collaborate to develop a voluntary, global disclosure framework designed to be the "gold standard" in business reporting. EBR provides a richer disclosure of financial and nonfinancial business performance measures so companies can provide all stakeholders with the information they need to make better decisions.

In addition to developing the strategy for implementing EBR through the creation of the EBRC, the AICPA Special Committee on Enhanced Business Reporting established the Public Company Task Force and the AICPA Private Company EBR Task Force to conduct research and develop examples of how EBR reports may appear.

The Public Company Task Force spent most of 2004 preparing several sample reports appropriate for public companies, available for review at http://www.ebr360.org/.

In addition to showing potential approaches to EBR, the reports demonstrate the potential benefits and commercial opportunities for stakeholders. The reports demonstrate sample disclosures for a number of diverse industries, as well as how to apply XBRL and other business reporting technologies. Samples are available at http://www.XBRL.org. The Public Company Task Force is now studying ways to simplify existing reporting...