Reporting tools for your small business
Reporting tools for your business to consider
In this article you will learn about:
Why reporting tools are important
The benefits of reporting tools
What reporting software is and some of the different types available
Reporting tools to consider
Different types of reports
Reporting best practices
Why reporting tools are important
Small business owners are required to wear many hats. Managing finances, employees, inventory, marketing and sales are just some of their responsibilities. Reports are one way for business leaders to keep abreast of how each area of the business is doing. However, in order for the reports to be useful for business decision making, they need to be based on good quality data. Trustworthy data can reveal valuable insights about the business.
Most businesses start off by compiling their reports in Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint. But with so much data to include, it quickly becomes too complex. The good news is that there is help available through a number of automated reporting tools which make it much easier to compile reports in the way that you want them to be structured.
The benefits of reporting tools
Compiling reports manually is labour-intensive and time-consuming. Reporting tools have a number of benefits, including:
Speeding up the reporting process
They allow you to create reports with precise parameters
Find insights in raw data
Integrate data with visualisation tools such as charts and interactive dashboards
Improve decision-making
What is reporting software
Reporting software organises data from different sources such as sales, marketing and finance, and helps you analyse it by structuring it and arranging it in tables or charts so that it is more easily understood and visualised. Good reporting software helps you to get information in the right format, quickly.
There are many different types of reporting tools:
Self-service tools allow you to build your own reports based on internal information.
Data visualisation tools represent information graphically using maps and charts.
Business intelligence tools help you to discover actionable insights.
Application performance tools display data on how an application performs, how many users it has, how much revenue it brings in and how it brings in revenue, amongst others.
Enterprise tools allow for custom structuring of information into organised tables, charts and dashboards.
Finance-related tools organise and find insights by analysing financial documents such as cash flow statements, balance sheets and income statements.
Reporting tools you may want to consider
Google Analytics 4 is one of the most widely used free reporting tools. It collects data on users’ HTTP requests, cookies, browsers, and operating systems with a Google Analytics Tracking Code and transfers it to Google Analytics servers as a list of parameters. The servers process information within 24 to 48 hours, and you can then build the necessary reports in your account. Your Google Analytics account can be integrated with other Google services, such as Google Ads or Search Ads 360.
Google Data Studio is a free report building software. It allows users to set up a connector to collect and compare information, configure interactive dashboards and create visualizations in Explorer — a space to explore the data you’ve collected. You can build your reports using Data Studio templates from the Gallery.
OWOX BI is a marketing analytics platform that collects unsampled data from various online and offline sources in one place (Google Analytics or Google BigQuery).
Microsoft Power BI is a business intelligence and data analytics tool you can use to automatically generate reports.
Qlik Sense is a data analytics solution that allows you to set up specific access controls to specific dashboards.
Different types of reports
There are 5 types of management reports that can be used for different purposes:
External reports are aimed at external stakeholders (such as investors, creditors, suppliers and bankers) to provide a view or context into something that might be affecting your business performance. While you may think your business is too small for external reports, they will come in handy when you are ready to scale your business.
Internal reports usually refer to any managerial task that needs to be reported on. They can be used for all levels of management and any area of the business. Consider, for example, a report by a store manager on stock control, or a report by your business accountant on how your cash flow is looking.
Progress or status reports track the progress of a project or goal. This kind of report is typically used if you are implementing a project or goal that needs to be track such as installing a new system to reduce costs, or refreshing your online store.
Operational reports track all areas related to the operation or performance of different metrics. Created on a daily, weekly or even monthly basis, operational reports are used to optimise business processes, lower costs, spot trends and improve the day-to-day running of the company.
Analytical reports use quantitative (numerically measurable) and qualitative (the measurement of non-numerical) data to analyse and evaluate the performance of a business’s strategies, including predictions and trends for better decision-making.
Reporting best practices
Use these reporting best practices to prepare useful reports:
Set strategic goals and objectives – define what you want to achieve, why you need to write the report and who you are writing for
Clean your data – delete formatting errors and duplications
Choose the right key performance indicators (KPIs) for your audience – remember who will be reading this report
Take customer feedback into consideration for what your business is doing right and what it is doing wrong. Consider encouraging your customers to give your business a review on your Google Business Profile to ensure you receive balance feedback.
Turn hard data into a story that everybody can understand. For example, instead of looking at overall monthly revenue in isolation, track the average spend of your top 10% of customers on a monthly basis, over a 12-month period, to provide insight on how satisfied your high value customers are.
Don’t mislead your audience with unethical data manipulations
An online dashboard tool allows you to consolidate data in one central point and build up an interactive report
Real-time insights need to align with your reporting goals – check that your real-time metrics are relevant.
Consider using predictive analytics and artificial intelligence to spot trends and patterns. An experienced data scientist can help you to analyse the data and spot trends.
Remember to prioritise the most important KPIs and don’t forget to take everyone’s ideas and perspectives into consideration when developing reports
Use separate boxes and subheadings to compartmentalise information. This is important because tracking data in isolation won’t give you the necessary insights. As an example, tracking total revenue in isolation won’t allow you to assess whether your online store is outperforming your physical store unless you measure them separately.
Encourage a data-driven culture within the business. Collecting data allows businesses to gather information and statistics about different areas of their operations which helps them make better decisions, more quickly. It can also help them find areas to improve, attract more customers and most importantly, how to keep them. (https://www.vodacombusiness.co.za/business/v-hub/knowledge-centre/5- reasons-to-become-a-data-driven-business)
A final thought
Knowledge is power – and if your business runs on it you will get the benefit of great rewards both in the short and long term.
What can you do now?
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Key Takeouts
Embracing data and using it effectively will allow you to make better decisions that drive your business forward.
