An effective embedded reporting tool helps to improve the flow of business processes in an organization by improving its data analytics and business reports. With a proper business report, you can quickly assess your organization’s working procedures and identify areas for improvement. This not only saves time and improves productivity, but it also gives you an understanding of key findings on your business environment and the place it holds in the market.
Whenever a business intelligence software product makes its way into the market, the main focus is unique features and options. Consumers rate, review and rave about the newest features, the unique options and the easier report building techniques. This is without any doubt the main assessment criteria for a business software tools’ success.
But the need arises to understand critical elements. Monitoring helps us understand how the business is performing and what rules govern business performance and growth.
Having access to data in real-time and regularly looking at the performance indicators help measure a business’s success. As James Surowiecki says rightly “In a world where companies increasingly know about their business in real-time, it makes no sense that public reporting mostly follows the old quarterly schedule. Companies sit on vital information until reporting day, at which point the market goes crazy.”
Another way of measuring business success and growth is target setting and defining business objectives and outcomes at an early stage. Setting your business in such a way can go a long way in monitoring and keeping track of the performance of the business metrics. Based on the data collected from these metrics, you can then design business strategies for achieving business outcomes and increasing revenues.
In this article, we will highlight relevant information in a business report that can be created and customized for having a long-term positive impact on business growth. These elements can be used to track the performance of employees and help management understand the focus areas that need attention to achieve business outcomes.
Types of Business Reports
Sales Performance
Monitoring and analyzing the sales performance over time can be a key indicator for measuring the success of your company. Sales can be generated in many ways and several metrics might be of interest when looking into the sales section:
Leads:
Leads are the prospective buyers or consumers that have shown interest in your products or services. This is a very good indicator of success as more leads equate to more people interested in your products.
Contracts:
Contracts are actual buys that happen in your business. This is the real sales picture and can also help data analysts understand how many of the leads eventually convert to contracts.
Won/lost ratio:
This business metric is also important to determine the success rate of your business. Of all the deals available in the market how many of them were your sales team able to secure as consumers. If this ratio is low then the management needs to focus on different business marketing strategies and promote their products to increase their winning chances.
Conversion rates:
Conversions are generally milestones in a business setup where an intermediate step of success is achieved like filling an online interest form or submitting a quote. Conversion steps measure consumer interest in products and services the business offers. This gives data analysts an idea of their products’ popularity in their business niche.
Revenues
Revenues are another item of interest when a business is monitored for tracking success. Revenues generated over time can be an indicator of profit or loss in business and can give data insight.
Revenues can be monitored in different categories and groups: you can have a complete company based picture of your revenue or you may be interested in revenue based on a salesperson to see which employees are performing well. The next section discusses goal tracking for employees in more detail.
Goal tracking
An important element of a business report is to set goals for employees and track them based on business outcomes. A great success measure in employee performance is to achieve goals. Business is successful when its employees meet deadlines, make sales and build their company’s reputation through positive interactions.
On the other hand, when employees do not perform effectively, consumers feel the negligence and succumb to their competitor’s efforts in the same niche.
Forecasting
A Forecast is the prediction of the business’s success in the future based on the current data. Forecasting can be done for each project and it is calculated at the current time. Forecasts are usually updated based on the project performance with time. This metric is useful in estimating the time and efforts of the employees, rather than the revenue generated.
Customer Data
Customer related data can add a lot to a company report because all firms rely on their customers’ satisfaction. A happy customer’s word of mouth is more precious than weeks of marketing and advertising.
Many performance indicators can measure business growth over time based on customer data.
Customer Feedback:
Customer feedback can be through reviews, surveys conducted through third-party survey teams, or feedback forms. All this information can help data analysts understand the worth of their products in the market and how to improve them.
The customer satisfaction index gives insight into how satisfied consumers are with the products and services offered by the company.
Customer Retention:
Customer retention is the measure of how long you are able to fulfill customer needs and retain them as consumers. When your company aims for success, it should grow the customer base but not let go of existing customers. This means regular analysis of customer feedback and complaints and meeting the evolving needs of existing customers.
There is lots to focus on when trying to find out about the trends in the business and leading the business to newer heights but these important elements would get you started in the right direction. Regular data analytics and reporting of these elements would help to find areas that need attention from top management leaders.
The use of business intelligence software and ad hoc reporting tools has made it a lot easier to keep track of employee data as well as customer-related information and fulfill the data analytics and reporting needs of the business. Software for customer relationship management (CRM) can also be a powerful alternative tool for analyzing information about your customers, the products and services they use.
