Who Gets Which Pages of the Monthly Pack

A branch manager emails the owner asking why his allocated overhead went up. The owner is between two things, does not want to retype the answer, and forwards the pack. It takes four seconds. The manager now has the shareholder account movement, every other line’s contribution, and enough payroll detail to work out what two colleagues earn. Nobody did anything wrong and none of it can be taken back.

That is the normal way this fails, and it is why distribution is a design decision made once and written down, rather than a judgement somebody makes in an inbox under mild time pressure. Decide who receives what before the first pack goes out, approve it at owner level, and then never make a distribution decision in an email thread again.

What goes in the pack, in what order, and why the statements sit at the back is a separate question and it is settled in the pack walkthrough. This piece takes that pack as given and deals only with what leaves the outbox.

The material that actually causes trouble

Most of a reporting pack could be pinned to a wall without consequence. Five things could not, and they are the reason the matrix exists.

Compensation, wherever it appears at a level of detail that makes an individual identifiable, which in a company of forty people means almost any detail at all. The shareholder and related party account, which records what the owners took and lent and is nobody else’s business. Customer concentration by name, which is commercially sensitive in both directions and is the page a departing salesperson would most like to have. Covenant headroom, which is a fact about the company’s negotiating position. And the control exception log, which names people who did things.

Everything else on the matrix below is a judgement about usefulness. Those five are a judgement about harm, and they get decided first.

The matrix

Columns are audiences. Where a column describes a body your company does not have, leave it on the sheet with the cells empty rather than deleting it, so that the day an investor or a lender arrives, the decision has already been made rather than being made in the week they ask.

Material	Owner or CEO	A manager with a line to run	Lender	Board or outside shareholder	External accountant
The written commentary page	Full	Full, less any item naming an individual	Not sent	Full	Not sent
Cash position and the forward forecast	Full	Summary line only, unless they control a material disbursement	Per the agreement	Full	Not sent
Result by line, branch or department	Full	Their own line, plus the company total so they can see proportion	Full	Full	Not sent
Balance sheet and working capital	Full	Not sent	Full	Full	Not sent during the year
Debt, facility and covenant headroom	Full	Not sent	Their own, in the form the agreement requires	Full	Not sent
Operating measures and the definitions appendix	Full	Full	As required	Full	Not sent
The statements in conventional presentation	Full	Not sent	Full	Full	From the close binder, not from the pack
Receivables ageing with customers named	Full	Not sent, except a named collections owner	Usually required. Check the agreement	Summary by bucket, names only where a concentration is a governance matter	Not sent
Payables ageing with suppliers named	Full	Not sent	As required	Summary by bucket	Not sent
Compensation and payroll detail	Owner only	Never	Never	Never, absent a specific governance reason and a decision to that effect	At year end, from the binder
Shareholder and related party account	Full	Never	Only where the agreement requires it	Full, because it is a governance matter	At year end, from the binder
Control exception log	Full	Never	Never	Count and trend only, without names	At year end, from the binder
The follow-up log	Full	Their own items	Not sent	Full	Not sent

Two columns need a word.

The lender column is the one people over-serve, sending everything on the theory that openness helps. It does not, particularly. A lender receives what the agreement requires, in the form it specifies, on the schedule it sets, and the extraction exercise that establishes all three is done once when the facility closes. Sending more than that creates an expectation you will be held to next quarter and gives a relationship manager material they did not ask for and now have to have a view about.

The external accountant column is nearly empty and that surprises people. During the year they do not want the management pack. They want the close binder, at year end, and sending them a monthly pack is sending a document prepared on a different basis for a different purpose, which is at best noise.

Do not redact. Un-include

The obvious way to run the matrix above is to produce the pack and then make cut-down versions for each audience. Do not.

A redacted document is a second document. It has to be produced every month, kept in step with the first, and checked, and the month somebody is in a hurry is the month the wrong file is attached. It also advertises precisely where the sensitive material sits, which is worse than not mentioning it.

The alternative is structural and it costs nothing after the first month. The material that only one audience may see is not in the pack at all. Compensation detail, the shareholder account and the exception log are separate named schedules that live in the close binder and are sent to their single audience on their own, on the same day. The pack refers to them by name where a reader needs to know they exist, without reproducing them.

The consequence is the thing worth having. The pack itself becomes one document, with the same figures in it, that goes to everybody who gets a pack, and the differences between audiences are handled by which schedules accompany it. Nobody is maintaining four versions of the same statement. Nothing that would matter if forwarded is in the file that gets forwarded. And when a manager asks a question, the honest answer is a named schedule rather than a decision about whether to send the whole thing.

The standing distribution list

One sheet, kept with the pack, approved by the owner. Distribution is not a finance decision and finance should not be making it, which is exactly why it needs to be written down rather than assumed.

Field	Note
Name and role	A person. Never a group alias, because an alias is a distribution list you do not control and cannot audit
What they receive	The pack, plus any named schedules, listed individually
Route	How it is delivered, and to which address
Effective from	The first period they received it
Approved by	The owner, by name and date
Next review	A date, not a rule
Removed on	Filled in and kept rather than the row being deleted

Four events trigger a review of the sheet, and only the fourth ever happens on its own.

A person leaves or changes role. A new facility, investor or shareholder arrives. Somebody asks for something they do not currently get, which is a request that goes to the owner rather than being handled quietly. And the annual review, on a date, which is the one that catches the three the company forgot to run.

The departure case is the one worth being blunt about. A manager who has left keeps receiving the pack for months in more companies than anybody would guess, because removing an address is not on anybody’s list and the pack goes out to whoever it went to last month. Put it on the offboarding list next to the building key.

Sending it

One sender, every month, and it is whoever runs the finance function rather than whoever is around. Same route, same filename structure, same covering note shape. If the function is fractional it is still one named person doing it, for the same reason.

The covering note names the period and states who the document is for, in one line, on the cover of the pack itself. This does not stop anybody forwarding it. Nothing stops anybody forwarding it, and a distribution policy that depends on people not forwarding things is not a policy. The line exists because it converts a thoughtless forward into a deliberate one, and because six months later it is the only evidence of what the intended distribution was.

Attachments go to individuals, never to a group alias, and never to an address the sender has not confirmed is still that person’s. Where a schedule accompanies the pack, it is a separate attachment with its own filename, so that forwarding the pack does not forward the schedule by accident.

What we do not do

We do not build a second pack with different figures for a different audience. The audiences differ in what they receive, never in what the numbers say.

We do not send a page to somebody because they asked for it in a meeting. The request goes to the owner, the sheet is updated, and then they receive it every month rather than once.

And we do not treat the distribution sheet as a formality that exists for an audit. It is read every month by the person who sends the pack, and if it has not been opened in six months it is already wrong, because somebody in it has changed roles and nobody noticed.