A seemingly modest change in UK corporate reporting has led to a significant change in the way businesses present their annual reports. Hayden Sutherland, Head of Digital Media at marketing services group All About Brands plc, looks at how businesses are maximising the opportunity to publish reports online.

Up until 2008 (and thanks to the Companies Act 2006) it was once a requirement for any UK listed company to send a printed copy of their annual report to every single shareholder. It was a hugely wasteful exercise that was neither practical nor sustainable and tended to aggravate environmentally conscious businesses and shareholders alike. Luckily that is not the case now and the Department of Business, Innovation & Skills estimates that UK listed companies have made ￡47m in cost savings.

The consequence of this move is that a lot of companies have realised that providing their report online has obvious benefits. Those benefits are numerous:

•It assists their overall Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) efforts;

•It facilitates viewing/downloading only part of the report (useful if the user is on a low bandwidth connection or only wants to print one particular section);

•It contributes to a more environmentally friendly company profile.

 A recent survey has found that almost half (49 per cent) of those questioned had a full HTML version of their site. The reasons given included:

•html is the only way to make full use of the internet’s potential.

•html has gradually increased in its usage, compared to just PDFs or images (usually in JPG format).

Surprisingly it is UK companies that have led the way, with 64 per cent of the FTSE100 found to use html. It is also interesting to note that in a piece of research into Corporate Responsibility conducted earlier this year, it was found that only 9 oer cent of those companies surveyed (mainly FTSE 100 and FTSE 250s) used just html for their reports, with 47 per cent using html and PDF combined.

Even US regulations now encourage company reporting in formats such as html, rather than just providing PDFs of the report pages. However using html is just the start of what can be achieved with your online company report. Animations and even audio and video (whilst remaining accessible to as many users as possible, so all sound media must have a transcript) add interactivity and help in the communication of company information to shareholders, employees, journalists and others.

So where's the future going for company reports? Well, depending upon who you ask, you get different answers. Those who have a CEO and board (and who are professionally media-trained) would say you should put as much relevant video into your online report as possible. This helps foster greater transparency and board accountability.

Those who are standards based would say that you should make a lot of use of XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) or at least have sensible tagging of relevant content. While those who are more opportunistic or are on a limited budget will wait and see what works or becomes legislation.

For investors and analysts, the publication of the annual report is not the event it once was since by the time it is published they have often already received far more in-depth information from other sources throughout the annual business cycle.

But the annual report remains a significant plank in the communications armoury of a business and its ongoing engagement with stakeholders and the innovation in online reporting is helping businesses to ensure their messages are heard more than ever before.

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