After you make it through a full year in business (with crowdfund investors onboard to boot!), you get to create an annual report that reflects what you’ve accomplished. If you’re familiar with the slick products generated by Fortune 500 companies, fear not: Your annual report doesn’t need to be anything that fancy. You could cover everything you need to in a few pages of text with some graphs or spreadsheets.
Talk with an accountant or a lawyer to get some advice about what to include in your annual report. Essentially, you want to thank your investors, provide them with the full year’s results of the business, show growth (you hope) in the business they invested in, and talk about the opportunities and challenges ahead and how you intend to reach new goals for the next year.
Here are a few specific suggestions for what to include:
A list of accomplishments for the year
Full-year financial statements (a balance sheet, statement of cash flows, and income statement) that compare your estimated budgets and actual results
What you see as the big opportunities for growth in the next 12 months and how you’ll prioritize achieving them
What you consider to be the big risks for the business in the next 12 months and what you’ll do to mitigate them
A request for any help that your investors can provide to assist you in reaching your goals the next year
