The hidden cost of board reporting: what your board papers really cost

Board reporting is expensive. But few organisations know exactly how much it's costing them.

Most finance teams can tell you what they spend on external auditors and legal advisers. But ask them about the cost of producing board papers, and you'll likely get a blank stare. That's because these costs are often hidden in plain sight — absorbed into salaries, buried in opportunity costs, and scattered across departments.

Board Intelligence and the Chartered Governance Institute UK & Ireland set out to quantify this hidden expense. Through extensive research with more than 800 organisations, we've built a model that reveals the true cost of board reporting. The findings are eye-opening. And they matter — because understanding what you're spending is the first step to understanding whether you're getting value back.

Before we talk about costs, let's be clear: board reporting isn't optional. It's essential for good governance, effective risk management, and regulatory compliance. More than that, when done well, it's hugely valuable for organisational performance.

The act of writing board papers gives busy executives a rare opportunity to step back from day-to-day operations and think about the big picture. It creates space for reflection — what's working, what's not, where the risks lie, where the opportunities are. It forces rigorous thinking about strategy and drives alignment across the leadership team. At its best, board reporting is a tool for clarity, focus, and action.

The problem? It's rarely done well.

Research we've conducted with the Chartered Governance Institute reveals that the challenges in board reporting are persistent, pervasive, and worsening. Papers are too long, too dense, and too focused on operational detail rather than strategic insight. They arrive too late for meaningful review. They don't answer the questions boards need answered.

When board reporting doesn't deliver value — when the process of writing papers doesn't create space for strategic thinking, and the papers themselves don't give boards what they need — the return on all that invested time plummets. You're paying the cost without getting the benefit.

One of the reasons board reporting is so expensive is that it consumes the time of relatively expensive employees.

For every board or committee meeting, C-suite executives, management, and subject matter experts are pulled into crunching data, writing drafts, and reviewing papers. Company secretaries coordinate briefs, manage submissions, and distribute board packs. The process ripples through the organisation, touching everyone from the chair of the board to junior analysts.

When you multiply those hours by the hourly rates of the people involved, the costs start to stack up. When a CEO spends three hours reviewing board papers, that's not free time, it's a direct cost to the organisation. When a CFO dedicates half a day to finalising a financial report, that's money. When multiple review cycles require input from five different stakeholders, each contributing an hour or two, those costs accumulate quickly.

Larger and more heavily regulated organisations face an additional burden: they typically produce longer board packs requiring input from a wider range of stakeholders and a greater proportion of complex papers (which require more extensive data gathering and review cycles).

There's an additional cost of board reporting that's even more significant than the direct expense: opportunity cost.

When board reporting is done well — when the writing process creates space for strategic thinking and produces papers that drive better board decisions — this time is well spent. The value generated justifies the investment.

But when executives are caught in endless review cycles, battling with unwieldy documents, and producing papers that miss the mark, they're losing on two fronts. They're not getting the critical thinking benefit from the writing process. And they're not delivering the insight and clarity that boards need to make good decisions.

Every hour your CEO spends wordsmithing a poorly structured board paper is an hour they're not spending on strategy. Every afternoon your CFO devotes to the third or fourth review of a draft that still doesn't hit the mark is time they could invest in analysing market opportunities or meeting with investors.

This is the real hidden cost of board reporting: not just what you're spending, but what you're not gaining. Time that could be deployed on execution, innovation, and leadership is instead consumed by inefficient process and ineffective outputs. And the strategic value that good board reporting should generate simply isn't materialising.