The SBL (Strategic Business Leader) exam is a remarkable examination that tests students’ workplace professionalism, technical skills, and ethical practice. Additionally, the SBL exam will check your way of responding to multiple people of different roles requesting various tasks as an accountant. The SBL examination is divided into multiple divisions, one of them being the technical article library. Integrated reporting lies under the technical article library.
A company requires a compact report presenting all the details of business deals over three different terms: short, medium, and long. This close report is called integrated reporting. In addition, the report consists of both financial and non-financial capital information, which impacts the company’s business deals. Besides, there can still be a question in students’ minds about the significance of integrated reporting.
Why is Integrated Reporting Important?
As mentioned above, integrated reporting gives a clear concept of all the components that play an important role in analyzing a company’s overall progress. Besides, some other facts explain the significance of integrated reporting, such as:
- Provides a clear view of value creation in the company over time to the financial capital providers.
- Benefits all the stakeholders who want to educate themselves regarding company growth, legislators, regulators, employees, local communities, customers, suppliers, and business partners.
- Can increase the financial capital provider’s capital allocation for the company.
- It helps the company visualize terminal goals and plan upcoming actions accordingly.
- Gives a record of past decisions, profits, and losses.
How do you Write an Integrated Report?
Students might consider Integrated report writing a hectic task; however, writing can be quite easy with proper planning of actions to take. Let’s plan your integrated report writing in the following points. Follow the below-mentioned instructions to create your integrated report.
Teamwork
Integrated report writing covers financial tracking, evaluating, and intercommunicating all financial and non-financial activities. An attempt to do all this by yourself can make you feel burnout. Thus have a team and allocate each team member with a certain topic so that it becomes easy for everyone participating, and the reports might come even more standard and to the point.
Aims and objectives
Always mention the aims and objects of your report at the beginning. The aims and objects shall contain questions regarding your audience, report goals, report key facts, what important topics you have worked upon, and the entire report layout.
Technical brief and policy
Mention a technical report brief where there is an explanation of the questions mentioned in the aims and objectives section. Similarly, you can also include your report’s style, theme, and structure.
Research, research methodology, and information fetched
After completing the technical brief and policy, you should move on to the research and information fetch process. In this section, you do not need to produce your report according to any predesigned guidelines. Instead, you will have to create your process. Although the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) standard is carried out as per the Global Reporting Initiative’s sustainability reporting guidelines, you do not have to follow it for this section.
Report Quality Assurance and Third Party Auditing:
After you complete your research and report writing, the quality assurance shall be carried out by a third party individual so that you become confident enough of your data to consider it reliable and present it to the stakeholders.
Publish your Report
This part shall depend on your instructor’s choice; however, having a hard copy and a digital copy is always safe and convenient.
Organize Meetings with the Stakeholders
Professional supervision and proper feedback are very important after the report creation. Meet with investors, NGOs, and finance professionals and consult about the company’s performance. The meetings will enable you to answer the questions related to different activities carried out during different stages of report preparation. Likewise, you will also know if there are any important topics you missed including in the report and in which section particularly.
What is Integrated Thinking in SBL?
Integrated thinking in SBL is an organization’s reflection on its relationship among the operating and functional divisions. Likewise, integrated thinking also reflects upon the use of capital by the company and its concerns.