What's a Flash Report

This article will help you to develop or enhance your weekly flash report.

Phil’s Profit Points™ in Brief:

• A flash report gives your managers a snapshot of critical business information.

• It includes financial and operating information.

• It fits on one page or less.

I was attending a client’s year-end meeting with their external accountant recently when the discussion turned to the current year. One of the owner’s updated their accountant with the current production speed, weekly sales targets and sales pipeline based on units of production. I was impressed. Knowing your numbers is the sign of a good manager. Do you know yours? If not, a Flash Report can help.

We’ve set up our weekly flash using the same structure found in our Business Owner’s Scorecard™ and our strategic planning metrics. This ensures that all of the information, analysis, decisions and actions are aligned; and that everyone is focused on the same important targets. One of the most powerful management processes is to align your entire company around two or three key metrics.

The major areas of our flash report are:

• Talent – measuring your human resource levels and major activities such as hiring.

• Marketing – measuring key marketing and sales results.

• Operations – measuring key production, safety and asset health levels.

• Financial – measuring working capital and average revenue per hour.

As a manager, you can have the most relevant information in your flash report. People at different levels will have different information. Front line people will have production and safety metrics. The general manager wants to see plant productivity. The president wants to see strategic progress in terms of sales success, market share, costing, and financial returns.

Flash reports can also vary depending on their frequency. A daily flash report may just focus on production and safety. It gets everyone’s attention when employees know that the president looks at the daily numbers.

A weekly flash may expand to include talent and financial factors (see our sample below). A monthly flash may highlight results compared to budget or business plan.

Remember, it’s your flash report so you can put whatever information you want. This may change as improvements are realized and you focus on more important opportunities.

Symco Weekly Flash Report

If you are new to flash reports, just start by measuring two or three key factors. You can’t measure everything at once. I recommend starting with a sales metric, a production metric, and a financial metric that measures cash flow (such as days to cash). A start-up will definitely focus on cash flow. Every business should know it’s total days to cash number.

If you are already using flash reports, then I recommend that you enhance them by adding strategic metrics such as customer retention, customer growth potential, gross margin by product/service line and detailed costing information. All managers and supervisors should have flash reports for their key areas of responsibility.

If you get twenty pages of reports from your information system or accounting department and have to spend a couple of hours looking for important information buried in the data, then you definitely need flash reports.

Tough Question

What information would help your managers to make better decisions?

From the Piggy Bank

As Peter Drucker said, “what you can measure, you can manage.”

Have a profitable week!