I have just spent the afternoon carrying out a bit of research for a few things that I hope to be involved in, in the near future. One part of this research was studying Googles annual/quarterly financial figures, if you feel compelled www.finance.google.com is simply superb for this. Not only were they easily brought into excel but they were easily understood and easy to follow. Add to this the way they have written the Company's history in clear and simple english is refreshing to the say the least. Its a pity that other plc's d'ont follow this path.

Compare this with reading a simple piece of 1997 legislation on prompt payments and you have to ask yourself, who actually writes this stuff. It took me a considerable time to firstly read it and then extract the pieces that will be relevant to me. The legislation was 20 pages long which I managed to compress to one A4 page of key points.

No wonder small and medium business are struggling, if they dont have the resource to clearly explain what is concerned in either legislation or regulations, they need to employ outside resources at a price. Perhaps little simple summaries would be a start along this road.

You seem to be comparing two different things here. An annual report by a public company to "a simple piece of 1997 legislation on prompt payments". Would it have been better to quote from the Google report and compare it with the report of another plc or else write a separate blog about the language of regulatory literature?