Make Your Financials Easier to Understand

In my opinion, most companies do a lousy job presenting their financials on their websites. It’s not that the information is not there; it’s just that companies don’t make it easy for investors to work with the data. I find this surprising given that financial information is the lifeblood of understanding how a company is doing, but it’s probably part of the regulatory mindset of investor relations. Many companies will disclose their financials to the extent and in the form regulations require it, but no more than that.

Computers and the web give us lots of innovative ways to present financial information in an interactive and easy to use manner. Yet most financials I see on the web are static and limited in scope, with little to no interactivity. This means that companies are forcing investors to laboriously build spreadsheets by copying over information and then creating formulas to calculate ratios. We’re starting to see this change a bit as you can now copy and paste the basic numbers with the use of XBRL, but it’s still not that easy to deal with, and the time periods are limited to those set out in the 10-Q and 10-K formats. And don’t even get me started about the pain and suffering involved in creating useful graphs.

Just to prove my point, I went out and looked at the web sites of four major players in the discount store sector, Wal-Mart, Costco, Target and BJ’s Warehouse Club. Here’s what I found:

Wal-Mart: provides quarterly press release financials, SEC filings and their Annual Report. The financials from the Annual report are in pdf format with three years of income statement and cash flow data and two years of balance sheet data, as you would find in a 10-K.

Costco: same as Wal-Mart.

Target: In addition to the same information provided by Wal-Mart and Costco, Target also provides Summary financial information in pdf format for their consolidated financials, retail segment and credit card segment for varying periods of time.

BJ’s Warehouse Club: The smallest of the four companies mentioned here, BJ’s actually goes one better than everyone else by providing, in addition to press releases and annual reports, an excel download capability for their 10-Q and 10-K filings, based on XBRL technology. (This information is also available for the other three companies, but you have to go to the SEC website to get it.)

In this day and age, there ought to be a better way to present the financials so that investors can get to the information they want quickly and with a minimum of effort.

And there is. A company by the name of Virtua Research (http://www.virtuaresearch.com/) has created a product, which they call Interactive Analyst Center, which allows investors to go in and look at multiple years worth of data, ratios and charts, in an easily accessible format. I’ve spent some time looking at the product and I like what I see.

The product allows companies to set up their sites to provide financial information to investors that they can use quickly and easily. For example, on the site I reviewed, there were five years of annual and quarterly financial data available. There was also a page that computed over 40 different financial ratios and even included some non-financial operational ratios that the company considered important. Finally, the part that I thought was the slickest, a charts page allows the viewer to go in and create charts with only one or two clicks.

I think many company websites could benefit from this product, as it compiles financial data about a company into a single easy to use package. In short, it allows investors to analyze instead of spending their time gathering data and crunching numbers. In this day and age of time stressed investors and short attention spans, anything a company can do to help investors get a handle on their financials should be worth a look.

(Full and fair disclosure: I have a potential financial interest in this product if sales result from referrals, so feel free to mention my name. It would be the first time I’ve made money from this blog.)

Say on Pay and Proxy Access – Start Thinking Now About Talking to Investors

The history of legislative and regulatory reform relating to Wall Street is one of egregious excess, followed by financial distress, resulting in laws and regulations being enacted. It first played out with the boom and bust of the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929, which gave us the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934. We saw a replay following the Enron/Adelphia/Worldcom/Tyco frauds in 2000, which resulted in the Sarbanes/Oxley Act. And now we are seeing the same scenario following the financial crisis of 2008 – 2009 as Congress is feverishly putting together a financial reform package.

I generally try not to pay too much attention to the legislative process, as things change frequently and the process is not pretty to watch. However, there are a couple of things that will likely be included in the current bill relating to corporate governance – proxy access and say on pay - that investor relations officers should be thinking about.

Corporate governance issues have traditionally been an area that falls within the purview of the Corporate Secretary or General Counsel with investor relations only becoming involved if the vote doesn’t look good or if some form of a contest is looming. As activist investors have increasingly turned to proxy proposals to agitate for corporate change, investor relations has gradually become more involved in the process because they are the ones that know the investors. If proxy access and say on pay are going to open up corporate governance to more public scrutiny, it behooves investor relations practitioners to start to get more engaged with the people who vote the proxies.

Of course, when you take a hard look at who does the voting, you realize that IR people have their work cut out for them. You can generally break down investor voting blocs into three categories: active long-term investors, passive investors and active short-term investors.

Active long-term investors usually don’t want to be bothered by this stuff. Portfolio managers and analysts want to analysis stocks, not get involved in corporate governance. Their compensation is benchmarked against their performance relative to an index, not against good corporate governance and they spend their time accordingly. The result is that these decisions are handled by either subscribing to one of the services such as ISS/Riskmetrics, handing it off to an internal committee if the firm is large enough, or by voting with their feet and selling the shares if they don’t like what management is doing. As a result, the typical investor relations officer usually doesn’t talk to the person casting the proxy vote.

Passive index investors can’t vote with their feet by selling the stock as long as a company is in an index, so they all have committees and policies regarding how to vote on governance items. From an investor relations perspective however, you never talk to these passive shareholders, so you don’t know anything about their committees.

Active short term investors are here today and gone tomorrow, so by the time they appear on a 13 D report, they may have well sold the shares and moved on.

I would suggest that investor relations departments need to be proactive in discussing potential vote issues with the people who actually vote the shares. I’ve written about this before (see my post of February 10, 2010), but here are a couple of suggestions to bridge this gap: First, well in advance of proxy season, investor relations officers, together with their securities law counsel, should schedule a number of calls to key investors (both active and passive long-term investors) to discuss current disclosure issues in areas such as compensation and governance. The calls should be designed as a dialogue to discover how these investors view the topics, not as advocacy. as you can’t solicit votes without a proxy statement. What investors are interested in can then be incorporated into your compensation and governance disclosures. Secondly, when you’re out on non-deal road shows, ask to spend five minutes at the end of a visit discussing the firm’s views on disclosure issues, whether they be compensation, governance or social responsibility. This actually makes for a nice break in the road show meeting rat race as it introduces a new topic into the discussion. In the larger firms this will mean that they will have to bring in someone at the end of the meeting, as there is usually a separate person that deals with proxy voting, but it is well worth the effort as it gives upper management an opportunity to hear investors’ concerns and thinking.

This doesn’t solve all issues, as sometimes the interests of investors about compensation and governance structures are different from management’s, but at least you’ll know prior to the vote being cast and can do more accurate predictions at proxy time.