Financial Statement Preparation Policy
Guidelines for Accurate and Consistent Financial Reporting Practices
This Financial Statement Preparation Policy is designed to elevate the quality and consistency of financial reporting across a company and its subsidiaries, ensuring that each unit adheres to a standardized set of protocols. By providing clear guidelines and structured procedures, this tool helps organizations maintain precision and transparency in their financial statements, supporting both management decision making and regulatory compliance. With its practical approach, it empowers teams to streamline monthly, quarterly and annual reporting, reducing errors and enhancing reliability.
This comprehensive document contains three distinct samples, each addressing a critical aspect of financial statement preparation. The first sample establishes the foundation for consistent monthly reporting from subsidiaries, detailing required schedules such as balance sheets, statements of operations and cash flow analyses. The second sample focuses on the controls and procedures necessary for accurate disclosures in public filings, emphasizing roles, responsibilities and validation workflows to ensure compliance with SEC regulations. The third sample provides detailed guidelines for reporting to corporate headquarters, covering requirements for actual financial statements, annual planning, outlook projections, and additional data requests, all aligned with U.S. GAAP and internal reporting manuals. Altogether, these samples offer a practical framework that makes financial reporting more straightforward and dependable—an invaluable reference for anyone looking to strengthen their organization’s reporting practices.
Sample procedures include:
- The document administrator puts a copy of the prior financial reporting period’s final report into the draft/current directory.
- All entries and balances in a unit’s general ledger must be supported by detailed accounting records.
- Prior-year numbers are compared to previously published reports and the comparison is documented in supporting work papers.
- Each operating unit should have a financial reporting manual which discusses the reporting requirements in detail.