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What a Monthly Management Pack Should Include (and What Your Directors or Bank Look For)

By Di Ma, Project Manager 22 OCT 2026 · 5 MIN READ

Statutory accounts arrive once a year, months after the year has ended. They tell your auditor and the tax office what happened. They are not much use for running the company, and a director, a co-founder or the bank that lent you money usually wants to know something simpler and more current: how did last month go, and where do we stand today?

That is the job of the management pack — also called management accounts or a monthly report. There is no legal format for it. It is whatever short set of pages lets someone who does not live in the books understand the business in a few minutes. Here is what a good one contains, and what the people reading it look at first.

Who reads it, and what they want

• Directors and co-founders want the trend: are sales and profit moving in the right direction, and is anything unusual this month?
• Shareholders and investors want the same, plus confidence that the numbers are kept properly and consistently.
• A bank or lender mostly wants cash and risk: how much is in the bank, who owes the company money and how late they are, and whether the business can meet what it owes. A facility letter may also require management accounts at set intervals — if yours does, check exactly what it asks for.

The same pack can serve all three, if it leads with the few numbers everyone asks about and keeps the detail behind them.

What to put in it, page by page

1. The headline figures

Half a page, before anything else: revenue and profit for the month, profit for the year to date, cash in the bank, what customers owe you, and what you owe suppliers. Each with last month's figure beside it, so the direction is obvious without reading a table.

2. Income statement summary

Revenue, cost of sales, gross profit, operating expenses and profit — for the month, the previous month and the year to date. Summarised, not every account: the reader wants the shape, and can ask for detail.

3. Balance sheet

What the company owns and owes at the month-end, against the start of the financial year. This is where a lender looks for the things a profit figure hides: a growing amount owed by customers, a director's current account, or liabilities building up.

4. Cash, and the next few weeks

Cash at the month-end is history by the time anyone reads it. A short forward look — ideally a 13-week cash flow forecast — answers the question a director actually has: will there be enough in the bank over the coming weeks, and when is the tight point?

5. Who owes you, and whom you owe

Receivables and payables, aged: not yet due, 1–30 days, 31–60, 61–90, over 90. Plus the few oldest items by name. Overdue customers are the single most useful early warning in the whole pack.

6. What's coming up

The statutory deadlines in the next few months — tax returns, annual returns, licence renewals — and anything outstanding that the bookkeeper is waiting on from the company. Small, but it stops the "we missed it" conversation.

The mistakes that make a pack misleading

• Different cut-offs on different pages. Profit to 31 August, cash "today", receivables as of last week. Every figure in the pack should be stated at the same date, or clearly labelled when it is not.
• No comparatives. HK$400,000 of revenue means little on its own. Against last month and the year so far, it means something.
• Books that are not reconciled. If the bank accounts have not been reconciled to the statements, every figure built on them is a guess. A pack is only as good as the bookkeeping under it.
• Too long. Forty pages of trial balance is an appendix, not a report. Lead with one page that a busy person will actually read.
• Presented as audited. Management accounts are prepared from the books and are not audited. Say so on the pack — readers, and especially lenders, should know what they are relying on.
• Arriving too late to matter. A pack for June that lands in September is an archive. The sooner it follows the month-end, the more useful it is — which depends on the books being kept current through the month, not written up afterwards.

Commentary: a few lines from you

Numbers explain what happened; they rarely explain why. When you forward a pack to directors or a bank, add three or four lines of your own: the reason revenue moved, a large one-off cost, a customer you are chasing, a decision you need. That is the part only the people running the business can write — and it is what readers remember.

How the Certanta management pack works

Certanta clients get a management pack with each books update: a short PDF, attached to the update email and downloadable from the client portal next to the statements, so it can be forwarded to directors or a bank as it is. It is built from the same books — checked by a bookkeeper — and contains, in this order:

• The headline figures — revenue and profit for the period with the previous period beside them, profit for the year to date, cash at bank, and what is owed to and by the company.
• An income statement summary — the period, the previous period and the year to date.
• A balance sheet at the period end, against the start of the financial year.
• A 13-week cash-flow forecast, with the lowest point marked.
• Receivables and payables, aged, with the five oldest items each.
• What's coming up — statutory deadlines in the next 90 days, and any questions from the bookkeeper still waiting for an answer.

Every page says it is prepared from the books and not audited. The headline figures are cut by the same calculation as the update email, so the PDF always says what the email says.

It comes with each books update — every month on a monthly bookkeeping plan. See pricing.

Frequently asked questions

This article is general information about management reporting, not advice for your company. Management accounts are not audited and are not a substitute for statutory financial statements.