Business intelligence reports are the essential tools used by managers on a daily basis to help them manage their businesses better. In order for any company to achieve success and sustain the growth, it has to be able to compare current business performances with the past and benchmark against competitors and targets.
Business Intelligence reports use all the relevant data collected from various sources and generate information for the management and other stakeholders to better analyze and understand their business.
Types of Business Intelligence Reports
Most of the business intelligence software delivers effective business reports that can be easily customized based on the business needs. Some reports are standard and more frequently used such as financial statements and financial ratios reports while other reports can be customized and developed based on the current business needs and analysis.
The reporting frequency varies from real time to monthly or even quarterly. For example, reports like CRM dashboards enable the organizations to get insight into business performances real time and instantly. It can be used for monitoring customer service quality, status of a sales promotion campaign, managers and users can drill down the data to identify issues and opportunities.
Business intelligence reports can also be used for managing employees performance in a more effective and efficient way. For example, hr dashboard and hr scorecards reports give insight into the human resources performances.
There are many other types of business intelligence reports that collect the required data, update the KPIs and create sales forecasts. In addition there are business intelligence reports which are short-term such as reports that monitor the performance of your current sales campaigns including the revenue generated, return on investment, conversions, margins, new customers, etc.
Reports like forecast analysis, lead summary and daily sales performance reports make it possible for managers to monitor day to day performance effectively.
The effectiveness of business intelligence reports is maximized by using visual indicators like business charts in addition to traditional data tables. Visual reports like business dashboards help managers understand the business by minimizing the time required for business analysis.
Business report templates are used to summarize and visualize the data, KPIs, important business metrics and relevant actionable business information. The graphical and simplified format in effective business reports gives the most benefits for the users. Business users do not have to go through all the data and numbers to make conclusions, but the key metrics are represented visually for them so they can focus on making decisions and implementation instead of analyzing unorganized data.
The charts and graphs make it fairly simple for users to interpret results. Business dashboard reports and business scorecard templates have made the life of managers easy by practically eliminating the need for them to collect data, manually prepare reports and then understand the findings and make conclusions.
Business intelligence reports and tools are available from many vendors and ultimately all of them aim at achieving the same result, to be able to provide the business users with valid forecasts, interpretations and analysis for business growth.
The investment and ongoing cost and maintenance of business intelligence reports however vary drastically. When deciding what business reporting system you need, it is better to focus on your business intelligence strategy and the benefits you expect from business reporting instead of looking at fancy tech features which cost thousands of dollars every month and still deliver the same benefits.