Annual Report Readership and Understanding: a Co‑operative Perspective

Beverley Lord, Yvonne Shanahan and Alan Robb

This paper reports on a study of how members of a major New Zealand co‑operative use their annual reports, addressing the dearth of accounting-based research in co-operatives. An important function of the annual report was seen to be giving members an indication of the value of the company and the fair value of their shares. Members read thoroughly both narrative and financial sections of the co-operative’s annual report, yet readers perceived the most important information to be profit. There were differences between investor-owned companies (Lee & Tweedie, 1977) and co-operatives in importance placed on particular information and in which parts of the annual report were focused on.