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The usefulness and Limitations of the corporate annual report, illustrating your answer by reference to one company's most recent 'Annual Report' and 'Annual Review' Documents.

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Corporate Annual reports are produced by companies every year to be filed at companies House by Law and they are sent to its shareholders in order to inform them on their success throughout the year of trading. All Corporate annual reports have similar structures and they consist of both non-statutory items which are the informational parts of the report and the statutory items which give some insight into the financial matters of the company. The report proposes to provide information that is useful in making economic decisions; it also assesses the companies' performance and outlook into future prospects. However, a corporate annual Report can be both useful and can have its limitations. I will now discuss the usefulness and limitations …show more content…

Another particular aspect on the Corporate annual report that I consider to be useful is the annual review that is provided in which gives a summary of all financial information to its shareholders (in appendix for Woolworths Group Plc). It provides a summary of the financial performance and of the operational highlights as with other summaries of the financial statements.

But its needs to be noted that the usefulness of the Corporate Annual report can depend on two factors and these are accuracy and timeliness. In regards to timeliness it has be recognised as one of the most important characteristics of financial statements by professional bodies such as the Institute of charted accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW). Carslaw and Kaplan, (1991) suggest that 'information should be made available to financial statement users as rapidly as possible', this therefore suggesting that information can be out-of-date as soon as it is published as the market is an ever-changing place. Some more research to support this claim comes form Abdulla, (1996) and it was argued here, 'that the shorter the time between the end of the accounting year and publication date, the more benefit can be derived from the audited annual reports'. So the usefulness of an Annual report can depend on how accurately it has been audited and the date of the published financial data.

Possible limitations on corporate annual reports could be that as the report is extremely long and

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