How is the annual report project organised?

6 huhti, 2022

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And what does the project cost?

The internal divisions of responsibility for producing the annual report differs between various companies and organisations. Most often, the investor relations, communication or financial accounting is in charge, but responsibility has also been assigned to other departments within the organisation.

Regardless of who is responsible, the project involves employees from various parts of the organisation and is highly resource and time consuming. The employees normally have other tasks to manage in parallel, tasks that need to be completed while the annual report is being produced. For this reason, it is very common to bring in external resources and expertise.

 

Different functions needed in the production of a designed annual report

  • Project management
  • Production management
  • Graphic design
  • Writing
  • Photography
  • Illustrations
  • Editing
  • Proof-reading
  • Translation

So, what is the actual cost?

survey external costs number of employees

According to our survey Words & Numbers, which you can download below, there is no clear correlation between the size of the organisation measured in the number of employees and the external budget for an annual report. Large companies and organisations with more than 1 000 employees have, admittedly, a larger percentage of budgets that exceed SEK 1m (EUR 0.97m). In total, approximately half of the companies purchase services for less than SEK 500 thousand (EUR 49 thousand).

Division of work, internally and externally

Many opt to purchase what is traditionally perceived as agency services, graphs and diagrams. As for the text, according to our survey Words & Numbers, more than 60 percent choose to write everything themselves, while 40 percent either buy all or parts of the copywriting.

survey annual report internal external work

What about the future?

The external budgets for designed annual reports appear to be relatively steady according to the responses to our survey. Some, 63 percent, say that the division of work internally/externally will remain unchanged over the next two to three years. 15 percent believe that they will do a bit more work internally, while about 18 percent expect to outsource more of the work. It will be very interesting to see the results in our upcoming survey – has it changed over the years?
future annual report external internal work

The smaller the budget, the more work is done internally

The respondents to our survey specified whether certain tasks are handled internally and/or externally. Among organisations that have the smallest budgets the majority of the tasks are done internally, and they also responded to a greater extent that some tasks are not done at all. Translation and photography are some of the tasks that are not done at all.
survey annual report budget

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