How to fail at management reporting

The Opportunity

The finance function’s significant role in providing financial information for decision-making creates an opportunity for those seeking to undermine an organization. Failing to provide timely, useful financial information hampers the ability of key decision-makers to lead the organization successfully and means those decision-makers will make decisions based on misleading, inaccurate, or even meaningless information. And the most significant opportunity for failing to deliver useful financial information lies within management reporting. The flexibility and customization possible in management reporting structures and systems mean finance departments have great scope for creativity in crafting and delivering useless and misleading reporting for executives, board members, business unit leaders, and other key decision-makers.

Don’t Deliver the Information Timely

The simplest and easiest way to fail at management reporting is to not report anything timely. The farther the organization travels obliviously into the future without decision-makers knowing about key performance measures, the better. Though the information captured in the general ledger and other systems inevitably looks backward in time, it can still provide insights into performance and trends that enable decision-makers to monitor activities and make real-time adjustments. The bigger the time gap between past results and current decision-making opportunities, the better. The data and its implications get more stale, and leaders miss opportunities for quick course changes.

If decision-makers push for more timely data, you can often plausibly push back with the assertion that you need more time to ensure accuracy. Do not acknowledge that you can often make reasonably accurate estimates or that many of the accuracy items you regularly wait on aren’t material to overall results. Let them proceed obliviously while you and your team work diligently to (eventually) get the financial results perfect down to that last penny.

If It Must Be Timely, Don’t Make It Useful

Perhaps you cannot hold the decision-makers off. They demand timely financial information. Give it to them. But that doesn’t mean what you give them has to be useful.

If they took time to define for you what they consider useful, the list would likely include these characteristics at minimum: reliable, understandable, and concise yet complete.

So seek out ways to undermine some (preferably all) of those attributes.

They Can’t Count on It

You have a two-stage opportunity for undermining confidence in the reliability of the financial information coming from your finance function.

The first stage involves tampering with the accuracy of the information reported, with many opportunities to do so at each stage of the processes:

• Gaps or errors at the general ledger level (GAAP applied incorrectly, entries made wrong, material entries overlooked, ineffective end-of-period cutoff procedures).
• Errors within the standard reporting packages from the accounting systems (misleading captions and categories, reports out of balance).
• Errors translating those system outputs into spreadsheet-based reports for the decision-makers (errors rekeying data, formula errors, hidden data, rows and columns that don’t foot and cross foot). The flexibility inherent in spreadsheet tools makes this last step in the processes especially ripe for inaccuracies. And so many of the problems get buried in hidden rows or complex formulas within individual cells or hardcoded data mixed in with formulas that these inaccuracies take lots of work to identify and correct.

But the second stage is more subtle and pernicious. If decision-makers encounter inaccurate financial information regularly enough, they will lose confidence in and cease to rely on any financial reporting you provide. When you’ve accomplished this, you don’t have to worry about providing inaccurate information at all. They won’t believe or rely on anything you provide, accurate or otherwise. Reliability results from recognized accuracy delivered over time. Tamper with the accuracy frequently enough, and you will certainly render your work product unreliable.

They Can’t Understand It

As your department churns out financial reports, you have many opportunities to ensure decision-makers can’t understand them.

Jargon, specialized acronyms, and abbreviations prove especially useful when deployed against board members. Their lack of day-to-day involvement in the organization makes them particularly vulnerable; they won’t be familiar with the communication shortcuts the management team uses regularly. Board members will almost always be less familiar with specialized language. Put them in the uncomfortable spot of having to ask for clarification—or not (in which case they make decisions in a bewildered state).

Supplement the unfamiliar language with the following tricks that regularly baffle all decision-makers, board members and management alike:

• Ambiguous report elements. Decision-makers can get lulled into complacency by the familiar format of captions down the left, headings along the top, and parallel columns of numbers in the body of the report. Mess with their minds by making headings and captions unclear; by failing to specify time periods or dates (or only partially identifying them: “Q1,” but of which fiscal year?); by failing to distinguish among actual, budget, and forecast data; and, in a report on a multi-entity organization, by leaving the specific entity unstated.
• Technical references. We finance professionals inhabit a complex and heavily codified world of GAAP, tax codes, and possibly regulatory arcana. Technical language and code section references to technical compendia powerfully obscure valuable information. Resist the inclination to provide a layperson’s explanation alongside the technical terminology.
• An inappropriate level of precision. The ideal is to report large dollar amounts with meaningless and distracting numbers of significant figures (billions of dollars of assets reported to the nearest penny, for instance) or to round small but material numbers at a level that obscures significant variations (for example, return on assets rounded to the nearest 10%).
• Zero context. This is the master touch. You can provide financial information timely, accurately, with unambiguous labels, and without specialized or technical language and still accomplish utter uselessness by providing context-less data. For example, you report that “days of sales in accounts receivable” at month’s end came in at forty-six. You’ve done your job; you’ve reported on financial results. Of course, decision-makers will not know how that compares with your organization’s results over time (trending better or worse or largely unchanged?) or with your peers or the average for your industry. Context is too valuable to decision-makers to include as a normal part of your financial reporting.

Give Them Too Much or Too Little

Decision-makers turn needy on this next topic, regularly insisting you provide them with the Goldilocks dose of financial reporting: not too much, not too little. Just right.

This provides an opportunity to swing toward either extreme: provide basic information only at a highly summarized level or deluge them with details. And the benefit of the latter—the swamping with minutiae—is that you can credibly claim transparency and thoroughness. Finance departments and executives often do this to boards: showing them so much information (thousands of pages for a monthly board packet) that they effectively reveal nothing. Meaningful, material, and actionable information readily gets lost in a profusion of data. 

For the master obfuscator, you can create the illusion of the Goldilocks outcome by combining a summary of financial results with schedules of supporting details. But for that to work as an effective obscuring technique, you must ensure (a) the summary data is presented at such a high level as to be meaningless on its own; (b) the supporting detail contains much, much more data than is important and that it is thoroughly disorganized and hard to navigate; and (c) most importantly, any connection between the summary and the supporting data remains elusive.¹

So Many Opportunities to do a Dreadful Job

Without much effort, a finance department can deliver the gold standard of zero-value management reporting: both late and not useful. And, not uncommonly, failing at usefulness can be accomplished in all three respects: unreliable, not understandable, and either too much or too little (or both).

But finance teams need not strive to fail in every aspect of meaningful management reporting. Failing in only one respect—whether timeliness, reliability, understandability, or appropriate volume—can still yield significant challenges for decision-makers and thereby undermine the success of the organization.

Data Visualization

Similar opportunities exist in data visualization of financial information (charts and graphs, etc.). Pictures can be as worthless as 1,000 obfuscating words. Data visualization commands lots of attention. Decision makers ask for it to help them understand financial data. You can use it to make sure they don’t understand the financial data correctly—or at least to force them to have to work extra hard to do so. Suggestions:

• Utilize a chart type that doesn’t fit the data. For example, use a pie chart or doughnut chart for time series data. Or use a line or area chart—both of which imply data across time—for data that does not have a time series element.
• Mess with the range of the vertical axis. This is, in graphical form, similar to the principle of providing an inappropriate level of precision in the reported numbers. And it is especially useful for trend data:
  • For data where minute changes are significant (fractions of a percentage point in return on assets, for instance), use zero as the lower bound of the range for the axis, thus obscuring significant changes as they occur, making them appear tiny, if they can be discerned at all.
  • For data where day-to-day swings don’t matter as much as general trends, narrow the range (setting the lower bound way above zero) to create a perception of wild, volatile swings, thereby obscuring the general trend amid the now-prominent noise of the day-to-day variations.
• Combine too many data elements in a single chart. The mind tends to have trouble processing more than a handful of patterns at a time. Exploit this cognitive limitation by loading each chart with lots of data. Also, Excel lets you show data relative to two vertical axes in line, area, column, and combo charts. Use both vertical axes and show as many individual data series on each as possible. (And, as a bonus, don’t clarify which axis applies to which data series.)
• Get fancy. Options for formatting creativity abound. Indulge your creative instincts: colors, highlighting, bolding, different font sizes, shadows, callouts, on and on. And explore the more obscure chart types, like scatter graphs, radar graphs, box-and-whisker graphs. All of these look sophisticated but can be hard to understand.

Here, as with the data itself, opportunities abound.

Eric R. Alexander

July 2026

No A.I was employed (or harmed) in the creation of this content.

© 2026, Six Arrows Consulting. All rights reserved.

This is an excerpt from Eric’s book released July 31, 2026: Stewardship Leadership for Stinkin’ Accountants: Serving as the CFO. (Used by permission)

 ¹ In every case, in the spirit of this article, do not pay any attention to this comment from Peter Drucker: “Information is, above all, a principle of economy. The fewer data needed, the better the information. And an overload of information, that is, anything much beyond what is truly needed, leads to information blackout. It does not enrich, but impoverishes.” Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, 488 (Harper Row & Publishers, 1973).