Annual report

• It was hard work. But if we can do it, anyone can. Admittedly, we are annual-report geeks. But we are also a tiny company with an annual turnover of just over £100,000. Almost all the charities we profile have incomes of over £1m. So if we can find the time to create a top-notch annual report, so can anyone else.
• It wasn't always comfortable to write. Good annual reports admit an organization's failings as well as its successes. That's never easy - but we must admit that we eventually found the experience rather cathartic.
• It took a bit longer than we thought. Last year, we predicted that it would take one-and-a-half days to write this year's report. This was wrong. It actually took a good few weeks - even longer if you count the time it took to get it signed off. A lot of that extra time, however, was spent contemplating the best way to structure the report and which headings to use. Next year, we'll use the same structure - and so we should save a lot of time
• We hope you find it useful. We know that most charities - especially small ones - don't want to spend a lot of time writing their reports. So we hope that our report will give other charities an idea of what we expect from them, and how other reports could be structured.

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