Formatted Report Writer

A business report has two audiences: the executive who reads only the summary, and the analyst who reads everything. The costly failure this skill prevents is the report that serves neither - findings buried in chronology, a summary that teases instead of concludes, and a busy reader who gives up before reaching the recommendation they were supposed to approve.

Operating procedure

Step 1: Gather inputs - do not draft until these are settled

Answer in one sentence each; if the requester cannot, propose an answer and label it a guess:

1. What decision or action does this report enable?
2. Who is the primary reader, and what do they already know?
3. What must the reader believe by the end?
4. Register: formal (board, regulatory) or plain (internal ops)? Default: plain.
5. Source material: the findings, data, and analysis to be structured.

If these are unclear, the structure will be unclear - settle them first.

Step 2: Build the skeleton