18 Jul How Automation Makes Business Reporting Easier
With an ever-growing and ever-changing business landscape, it’s all too easy for some things to get left behind. That’s why internal communications and reports are crucial to success. That’s where both automation and business reporting comes in.
Business reports are full of business leaders favorite thing—data, and lots of it. That doesn’t sound super exciting, but that doesn’t mean business reports aren’t beneficial in the long run.
All that data takes a lot of time to dig through. With more data about your business coming in daily, you must incorporate automation into your business reporting.
But what exactly goes into a business report, and how can automation help you with this task? Read on to find out. An improved business is just a few steps away.
What Is Business Reporting?
Business reporting takes an objective look at your business over a specific period and provides insight on where and how the company can improve. Whether you’re in the business of sales or customer relations, your business report reflects how your operations went forward during that time.
Many business reports are an excellent learning tool for companies to see what initiatives have worked well in the past and which haven’t.
Business reports come in many forms and look at several data sources and different aspects of your day-to-day operations. But essentially, reports all do the same key things:
- Gather information
- Organize the information
- Analyze the information
Business reports are put together with data and facts, not opinions, so that observers can have an objective view, identify opportunities for growth, and make informed decisions.
What Is Office Automation?
Office automation is the use of applications rather than people to perform your most frequent and repetitive tasks so that your team can spend more time growing your business. Some common uses of automation in companies of all sizes are job application processing, regular meeting scheduling, payroll management, email marketing, and more.
Automating these tasks frees your team to spend more time on critical thinking and helps everyone stay more organized.
Automating your data can also eliminate unnecessary data to give you the most transparent picture of the health of your business. Your data may need cleaning up if you’re not paying attention to your automation or doing regular business reports.
How Do Business Reporting and Automation Go Together?
Business reporting isn’t an “extra” to pull out of your pocket when you need an edge over the competition. For business owners, it’s a vital part of running their company.
Whether informational or analytical, your business reports give you data on how your business performs in critical areas. This data collection is crucial in determining the next steps for your business, whatever level you may be at.
If your data is already automated, it will make building a particular business report much quicker and easier.
The goal of business reporting—like with automation—is not to spend hours and hours collecting data about your profits and losses, employee retention, inventory, or anything else. The goal of business reporting is to get an objective view of what direction your business is headed in, and proper office automation will get that picture in front of you much quicker.
Types of Business Reports
As we’ve discussed, business reports serve a lot of purposes. Some are general information and performance reports, while others serve a specific purpose. The best part is that all this information can be automated, making building a report much easier.
Here are some of the most common regular business reports and their purposes.
Annual Report
As the title suggests, you need an annual report for each fiscal year of your business. Your annual report shows what your company has accomplished in the past fiscal year and can be used to encourage potential investors and increase excitement for the future with your current staff.
Publicly traded companies are legally required to submit an annual report each year.
Profit & Loss Statement
Also called a Sales and Revenue report, a Profit & Loss statement is a standard business report that compiles your revenue and expenses over a certain period. A profit and loss statement makes it easy to compare and contrast your business over months, quarters, years, or any period of time.
They also make it easy to determine your possible earnings or losses in the coming months and help you determine best practices.
Given that this financial reporting is full of numbers, properly automating your sales data will save you a big headache when making a profit and loss statement.
Inventory Report
For any business involved in selling products, regular inventory reports are crucial. It can be a simple list with the number of products available at a given time or more complex, detailing each product’s inventory change over a specific period.
It’s crucial to know how much of each product you have in stock, which product sells the quickest, and which one takes the longest to manufacture, and an inventory report can give you all that information.
Marketing Report
Marketing lets the public know about your business, so it is essential to market wisely. A marketing report will tell you which promotional efforts are working and which aren’t so that you can use that energy and budget wisely.
Web Traffic Report
Your website is essentially your business’s storefront on the internet. Knowing how many people are visiting your website, how they got to your page, and what they do once they get there can give you vital insight into your customers and help you plan your next move.
From telling you whether site visitors are from Google or social media to the demographics of your visitors to how long they spend on your site, web traffic reports can be a considerable help in your future practices.
How Consortyo Can Help
Business reporting is crucial to keeping your business moving in the right direction, so your data needs to be accessible and organized. That’s where we come in.
Consortyo can help you compile, categorize, analyze, and interpret your data by implementing a strong office automation network. We’ll work with the software you already have to ensure it’s working correctly and efficiently, clean up any unnecessary data, and strengthen any areas that need it.
We can pull your data from multiple platforms into a complete picture and set up automated reports so that you don’t fall behind in the future.
The new reporting tools will make sure that your information will be securely waiting for you when you’re ready. That way, senior managers can spend less time compiling business reports and more time planning for future successes.
Call us today to get started.