Introduction

Business reports are essential tools for any enterprise irrespective of industry or size. They provide a means to track and analyze the performance and overall health of the business while identifying areas of improvement and opportunities for growth.

Reporting is the art of collecting data from various data sources and presenting it to the end-users in a way that is understandable and ready to be analyzed, as well as act on it. Regular business reporting and monitoring are also necessary for many organizations to keep senior management, board members, and other stakeholders advised on what is happening within the organization. 

Dashboards are comprised of several reports of similar or different types. Dashboards can be further broken down into various different views comprised of reports on specific categories such as Playbooks, CS Operations (i.e Tasks, Notes, Logs, Meetings, Alerts, etc), Accounts, Renewals, Users, Product Adoption Metrics such as feature usage trend, Health trend and many more as per the organization requirements. 

At CS Box, we use Metabase analytical tool for reporting and Dashboards. Metabase is a simple and powerful analytics tool that lets anyone learn and make decisions from their company’s data—no technical knowledge required.

Kindly go through this link to learn more about Metabase and how it works!

BI(Business Intelligence) Data reporting

When we talk about reporting in business intelligence (BI), we are talking about two things. One is reporting strictly defined. The other is reporting taken in a more general meaning.

The Goal of BI Data reporting is to see, understand and act upon data. Reporting deals with data, while analysis is what turns the data into information.

For e.g - a sales report may include rows representing sales reps and columns showing orders taken, units sold of each major product, revenue generated, etc. 

Business reports in action 

Different reports will provide distinct value for all functional areas of an organization. Examples of some common reports include market analysis, trend analysis, and financial analysis as well as operational and performance reports. 

• Market analysis reports:- They help business owners decide how to allocate their resources. For example, when an analysis of the market concludes that the ensuing business year will see accelerated growth, companies can increase their marketing budget to take advantage of this
  

• Trend analysis reports:- These reports support long-term business development by examining statistical trends such as consumer preferences and the demographic groups that are experiencing the quickest growth rate. The objective of a trend analysis report is to identify growth opportunities to enable businesses to build market share ahead of competitors.
  

• Financial reports:- Financial reports are generally prepared on a regular basis by most companies and help to keep them on track toward achieving revenue and profit objectives. These reports highlight any variances in the financial results compared to forecasts in the annual business plan and will explain the reason for any significant negative variance.
  

• Operational analysis reports:- These reports show how efficiently a company is operating and will recommend ways to further improve productivity. An analysis of inventory control might indicate that the company experiences periodic shortages of key raw materials that prevent timely order fulfillment. The report may recommend that the company look for backup suppliers of essential items to ensure availability when needed.

• Performance reports:- Monitoring performance trends help the company to set KPIs, benchmarks, and business goals based on the most important aspects of the business. Performance reporting allows the business to compare performance over different timeframes and report objectives should always align with KPIs to demonstrate if these have been met or even exceeded.

BI Data Reporting Best Practices

• Prepare your reports with the next step in mind, which is analysis. Format your data in a way that is conducive to quick and intuitive analysis, and name your columns in a way that is both consistent and understandable to the end-users.
  
  

• If you are the report developer or system administrator, don’t confuse the end-user with too many objects. Work with them to understand what their needs are, and give them a report that is as clean as possible, eliminating clutter and unnecessary pieces of data by carefully selecting the objects end-users can see and report on.
  
  

• Be mindful about sensitive data and use role-based security, authentication, and authorization to grant or deny access to reports, columns and records to selected users or user groups.
  
  

• Leverage the power of the Metabase to create reports that are powerful, interactive, and easy to navigate, while placing as little a burden as possible on the system.

Contact Us

In most cases, you would have a dedicated Customer Success Manager who will be your point of contact for any queries or assistance. You can always:

1. Initiate a chat directly from within your CustomerSuccessBox. Use the Chat option from the Chat icon on the top right side of the navigation bar.

2. Create a conversation from here.

3. Send an email to the Support team.