To increase the success of your business, you have to specify, maintain, manage, and measure important business data efficiently through detailed analysis and reporting.
Understanding these metrics help you isolate problems and define success. Once you determine what success is, accordingly, you can change your business plan.
Businesses have to focus on preparing reports that add value and offer actionable insights. Most of the corporate reports are quite chaotic and difficult to understand. They just dump information on the viewer, which is then expected to make sense of it without any clues about how to interpret that data or where the essential bits are hiding. It’s up to the viewer to process all the data and find the valuable nuggets to make an impact on their business.
Therefore, we are providing you with ways in which you can improve your business reports.
1. Identifying Essential Data
The disorganized tangle of unnecessary files is a critical issue for today’s leadership. Data is one of your business’s most valuable assets, and those with usable data experience a 10% increase in productivity and 35% rapid growth every year. It is crucial to understand your business’s problems and challenges with data that can be measured and improved. By identifying the correct data, you can obtain critical business intelligence with which you can create targeted strategies and enhance customer acquisition, satisfaction, retention, and overall ROI.
2. Recording Required Data
Once you’re done identifying the essential data for creating actionable insights, you must know whether you’re recording enough relevant data. You may need to make some changes either by customizing the software you use or redesigning your reports to incorporate fields that will help you get a clear view of the necessary information. Also, removing unnecessary “clutter” will allow you to scrutinize the important data, thus enabling you to improve your business operation.
By analyzing and reporting on exact data, you can prepare roadmaps, projections, and forecasts that allow decision-makers to set budgets and targets and identify trends along with ways of making improvements. If your existing system doesn’t enable you to make customizations for recording the data you require, considering something more flexible that adapts to your changing business needs is worthwhile.
3. Extracting Meaningful Data
Predefined reports help you gain business insights in a quick and easy way. But, since no two businesses are the same, it’s essential to utilize Business Intelligence (BI) tools that enable you to interpret your data. Tools allowing you to export data into Excel sheets are ideal since they enable you to simply manipulate your data to prepare custom reports. Excel is also a comfortable tool that allows people without specific Business Intelligence, reporting or analytics training to extract the necessary information and present it in an easily understandable format.
Dashboards allow you to extract vital real-time data. They can fetch information from your accounting software, CRM system, email, and website analytics, into one place, so you need not log into multiple systems.
4. Presenting Your Data
Presentation is everything. Reports must present your data in an easy-to-understand visual format, offering decision-makers crucial information that will enable them to make informed business decisions. Dashboards are perfect for delivering real-time data insights at a glance. While presenting your data, your report must –
- Recognize performance compared to previous activities
- Compare data from last months and forecasts to provide context
- Highlight anomalies, risks, and success
5. Automation
Once you’re done identifying what you need to measure and how to extract the correct information, look for a way of clubbing reports from disparate systems. All the data you need is in one place by utilizing one system. For example, ERP software is a great way to consolidate your systems into a centralized company wide solution. You can automatically schedule reports to run instead of manually running multiple reports and be emailed them to the respective people. If you need real-time data, dashboards can automatically fetch the information you want to drill down into one place.
If you are looking for professional support to improve your business reporting, feel free to reach us at Semansys.