Quarterly Report (Part 2)

Synopsis

Reflect upon your progress and achievements from the past three months to improve future performance. Use our all-new Quarterly Report (Part 2) deck to instill greater discipline and controls over performance metrics and share timely information with employees and stakeholders.

Slide highlights

Use this slide to cover the presentation's table of contents. This step is important as it gives an overview of the upcoming information to the stakeholders and helps you to set the stage for it.

With this slide, touch upon the main Q1 highlights. These may include major achievements, new and completed projects, revenue reports and financial outlook, customer satisfaction rates and KPI results.

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Overview

According to invoicing and accounting solution firm FreshBooks, a business performance report is a business tool that offers a survey of the business' Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). It integrates information and analysis for predicting revenues, expenses and profits for the upcoming time period.

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Performance reporting is essential to a venture's success for the following reasons, the experts from FreshBooks say:

1. Benchmarking – benchmarking aids a venture in being open to new techniques for efficiency, productivity and customer satisfaction improvement. It also decreases guesswork and focuses on finding solutions to specific problems.
2. Workforce monitoring – the use of KPIs helps to monitor and control employee behavior and performance. It also expands the business process and strengthens cohesion among subordinates and the employer, the experts say.
3. External reports preparation – performance reporting assists in the preparation of the external business and conducting regular quarterly reports will provide well-organized data and analysis for the future Annual Report (Part 3).
4. Business performance boost – performance reporting provides real-time information about the current state of a business, which can be used to create a better-calculated strategy and set achievable goals.
5. Communication improvement – performance reporting improves customer insights and helps to better understand their needs and pain points. In addition, it provides investors with information about the current status of business performance and its future course of action.

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Application

Key elements to cover in the business performance quarterly report:

• Objective and high-level goals
• Measure of the KPIs
• Data sources used for KPIs monitoring and measurement
• Financial performance
• Client and project updatess
• Competition analysis
• Future strategy

Case study

Shopify Q1 2020 report

In March 2020, a leading global commerce company, Shopify, released strong financial results for the first quarter of the year. Besides financial insights, Shopify shared the overall company performance and other valuable information business owners and managers can learn from when conducting Q1 reports.

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The company's press release announcing Q1 Report states the following:

• New stores created on the Shopify platform grew 62% between March 13, 2020 and April 24, 2020 compared to the prior six weeks, driven by the shift of commerce to online as well as by the extension of the free trial period on standard plans from 14 days to 90 days.
• While year-over-year (YoY) Gross Merchandise Volume1 (GMV) growth accelerated in April compared with the first quarter of 2020, and this growth was distributed over a broader base of merchants, it is unclear how sustainable consumer spending levels will be in this uncertain economic environment.
• The shift of consumer spending toward online is apparent: the number of consumers estimated to have made a purchase for the first time from any Shopify merchant grew 8% between March 13, 2020 and April 24, 2020, compared to the six-week period immediately prior. Over the same period, the number of consumers estimated to have purchased from Shopify merchants they'd never shopped at before grew by 45% compared to the six-week period immediately prior.
• While GMV through the point-of-sale (POS) channel declined by 71% between March 13, 2020 and April 24, 2020 relative to the comparable six-week period immediately prior to March 13, as most of Shopify's Retail merchants suspended their in-store operations, Retail merchants managed to replace 94% of lost POS GMV with online sales over the same period.
• While new types of merchants, such as food stores, are migrating to Shopify Plus, March and April also saw more merchants downgrade from Shopify Plus to lower-priced plans than in January and February.
• Certain categories of GMV grew faster between March 13, 2020 and April 24, 2020, including Food, Beverages and Tobacco, which doubled during this period relative to the 6-weeks immediately prior to March 13.
• Apparel and accessories, a historically larger contributor to Shopify's GMV, experienced a softening in GMV in mid-March, followed by a recovery at the end of March, which continued into April.
• Shops are seeing more local customers: in the six-week period since March 13, 2020, in English-speaking geographies, the percentage of customers per shop coming from within 25 kilometers of the shop's registered address had increased, as had the number of shops with at least one local customer, while local orders in these geographies more than doubled.
• Shopify ended Q1 2020 with a strong liquidity profile with $2.36 billion in cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities on our balance sheet and continues to prudently manage costs, redirecting cost savings from reduced travel, events and office operations toward merchant-relief initiatives, while advancing certain investments that will serve merchants both now and in the long-term.

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