Annual and Quarterly Reports Editing and Proofreading Services

An annual report is the one document a company cannot take back. It is filed, archived, indexed and quoted, and it will be read years later by a litigator reconstructing what management knew and when they said it. It is also read next week by an analyst who will compare this year's wording against last year's, sentence by sentence, and draw conclusions from what changed. Very few documents are scrutinised both that closely and that permanently, and almost none are drafted by as many hands.

We edit what listed companies and their advisers produce — annual reports and Form 10-K or equivalent filings, quarterly reports and interim statements, management discussion and analysis, chairman's and chief executive statements, strategic reports and business reviews, risk factor disclosures, remuneration reports, corporate governance statements, notes to the financial statements, sustainability and climate-related disclosures, earnings releases and results announcements, and the analyst script and question-and-answer preparation that accompanies them. Our editors check that the narrative sections agree with the numbers they describe, that terminology is consistent between the front half and the financial statements, and that a change in wording from the prior year is deliberate rather than accidental.

Management discussion and analysis is where these reports earn or lose their credibility, because it is the only section where management explains itself in its own voice. The weak version describes what the numbers already show — revenue increased, margin decreased — and attributes movements to a list of factors without weighting any of them. We rewrite MD&A so each material movement is explained by cause and quantified: which portion of the revenue increase came from price, which from volume, which from currency, and which from the acquisition that completed in March. We make sure a trend management expects to continue is distinguished from one it expects to reverse, and that where performance was poor the explanation reads as an account rather than a defence. Analysts model from this section, and one that lets them attribute movements correctly earns more patience at the next disappointment than any amount of confident framing.

Everything you send is treated in strict confidence, including drafts ahead of results and material that is price-sensitive until release. We are editors rather than accountants, auditors or legal advisers, and nothing we do substitutes for your reporting accountants or counsel — but we can make the language precise, consistent across a document written by twelve contributors, and readable by the investors it is meant for.