The recent letter from the Financial Reporting Council to audit committee chairs and finance directors contains a shopping list of improvements it expects companies to make to their annual reports. The main theme, however, is clarity. This is the message it has heard from investors on strategic reports (“user friendly and more clear”), business model reports (“clarity of the explanation of how the company makes money and what differentiates it from its peers”), and all sorts of accounting policies (“more detailed disclosure of how dividend policies operate in practice”).
