Records, Reports, and Repercussions

Libraries are filled with records - that is, after all, what books, journals, newspapers, and e-files in all their varying types are. However Libraries also generate records.

Financial records - the library budget, budget receipts, building maintenance costs, as well as employee pay records.
Facility records - repairs, upgrades, tools, outsourced maintenance (for example: landscaping or snow removal contracts), and floor plan.
Meeting records - committees and board membership, municipal or provincial oversight, even the meetings of the librarians to discuss programs and other such planning.

These records have nothing to do with MARC or Cataloging Materials. They have to do with running a business. That the business of Libraries is non-profit and solely concerned with bettering their community is irrelevant. The Library generates many of the same type of records as any other business.
Toronto Public Library Record Management Policy is a clearly written example of the type of policy needed to deal with this fact of Library life. A somewhat longer version is the UBC Library Records Management Policy which deals with the records of the entire University as well as donations. It's a much longer document but has a lot of practical advice in it.

Reports are a fact of life. The rational for reports is that they are used to reduce large amounts of data to their most basic and using that to render judgement. As may become obvious very soon (if it isn't already) the biggest question is not 'what to put in' the report, it's 'what NOT to put in' the report. If all the relevant information was put into every report, the text would take as long, or longer, to read as the events being reported on took to happen. This is not a good thing. If you bore your audience they will ignore you - and you won't get the [funding, assistance, job, etc...] that you want for the work you put into the report in the first place.
There are many helps out there for generating reports.
Library Technology ILS Marketshare Migrations, American Libraries Magazine Systems Report, Library of Congress Collections Report and others show how it can be done and offer hints for how to do it yourself.

As a result it's important to keep good records so that you can write good (succinct!) reports which in turn will help you build your Library and Community.

Repercussions of not doing this... well, it makes life difficult. Then compounds the difficulty until the job becomes intolerable.

We can make the choices we want to. The repercussions - good and bad - are attached to those decisions and arrive whether we want them or not.