What belongs inside a reporting year
A reporting year is a fence around invoices, not a vibe. Here is how we decide which months, meters and buildings sit inside it.
Boards often ask for “last year’s energy” as if the calendar and the contract were the same object. They are not. A reporting year has to name a start date, an end date, and a rule for invoices that straddle the fence.
We treat the year you name in the brief as closed. If you say 1 April to 31 March, a bill dated 4 April that covers March still belongs in the old year for the days it actually covers. Where a supplier only prints a total, we split by the number of days on the bill and write that split in the notes so a later reader can undo it.
Buildings that opened in June cannot carry a full-year chart without a caveat. We show the occupied months and refuse to annualise them into a tidy fiction unless you explicitly ask for a separate, labelled estimate.
Landlord incoming meters that serve a parade of shops need a sentence in the opening pages: either the whole incoming figure stays in the estate pack, or you already hold sub-meters and we report those instead. Mixing both without a sentence is how committees lose an afternoon.
If you are changing the year-end to match a parent trust, say so before the draft. Redrawing the fence after charts are set means every weather note and every occupancy comment has to be rewritten, not just the axis labels.