Through these formal business documents, we learn about the business structure, entity type, organizational arrangement, purpose statement, company culture, and much more.

One common way businesses share this information about themselves is through their websites.

How can formal documents help managers solve problems? Here are the top three ways.

Having formal business documentation helps to keep your business message consistent not only to the staff, but also to your constituents. This helps managers to be able to go to company policy to make sure that what they are sharing with the public is exactly what the company has promoted throughout. Consistency within companies also builds trust, loyalty, and repeat business.

Formalizing your documentation does not make your company boring, and lackluster, it does the very opposite it makes it a company that is appealing, because the messaging is consistent. It gets across the point that we do what we say.

Managers are always trying to find ways to make the company more efficient. Reinforcing the importance of business documents is a tremendous time saver. It is much more productive to be able to go straight to a policy in order to get an answer, rather then creating a new policy on the fly that may contradict the company’s core values, or just be redundant.

Efficiency saves time, and we all know that time saved is money saved.

The United States Congress reviews budgets and makes recommendations to the President of the United States for the many departments and agencies that make up the Federal Government. (Here is a formal document that illustrates the point.)

This is not done in a vacuum. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) relies on the various government offices to send in their formal recommendations via budget reports. Then OMB will take the data and create charts, graphs, reports, all manner of more formal documentation for the President to review.

This is why working with an accounting team helps every business to formalize business documentation that shows the profitability and health for the business on a regular basis.

It bears repeating, formal business documentation can be very difficult to read through, it is often tedious to write, and for all the effort of making sure to dot every “I” and cross every “t” these documents are the least read materials in advance of a problem.  Therefore, having them prepared will save time, energy and reinforce business standards within every company.

Some of these documents include: job descriptions, policies and procedures, employee handbooks, annual reports, believe it or not even offer letters are formal business documents. Here are a few more formal business documents that organizations need.