Reporting Solutions on Company Data: Five Tips

Too many companies think of reporting software last, not first – long after they’ve stored and organized their data. At that point their data is a mess and not easy to understand or report upon. If you’re planning to use business reporting software, you should think about reporting BEFORE it gets to the point when you need to implement it. Here are six items to square away in the early stages of collecting and organizing company data.

Data Separation. One retailer (which prefers to remain nameless for obvious reasons) set up an active, functional online store. They captured all the necessary information about the purchaser, including name, address, gender, mailing list preferences, etc. Unfortunately when it came time to analyze the data, though, they realized they couldn’t break down the user demographics by state and further by city, because the city and state were gathered as one entry. Think about future use of your data and break each piece into its own field so that your reporting solutions will be able to glean all it needs to.

Linked Records. Carefully consider not only what information you need to collect but also how that data needs to be interconnected. Let’s say you’re in sales and you want to track how many orders or leads a particular rep got during a given time period. Your order system, then, must have the ability to include the rep’s ID along with the order number. Otherwise, your reporting software will have no way to join that information automatically, and manually adding it in is a long, tedious and expensive process.

Unanticipated fields. It’s (somewhat) easy to think about what data you’ll need to run your business, such as customer purchasing info, inventory lists, employees records, etc. What’s harder to think about is what data you’ll need in order to run your business more efficiently.  For example, suppose some of your customers are located overseas, where English is not the native language. That may not matter initially when collecting the data, but marketing may eventually want to see a report that breaks the customer base down by language. Thinking about your reporting needs first will help ensure you have the right reporting tools you need for critical business intelligence.

Data storage systems. Every company knows it’s vital to keep costs down, and it’s tempting to rely upon legacy databases rather than investing in new data collection and storage systems. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right? But while those old or obscure data sources may be fine for gathering the data you need, they may not be at all compatible with a reporting software solution. Before you put a lot more time and energy into your data storage system, take a look at your top three reporting systems and ask yourself if it is compatible with ANY of them. If not, it’s probably time to bite the bullet and invest in an updated database or other data source.

Reporting requirements. Reporting requirements are constantly changing. Whether you need to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley (a US law that set standards for public company boards, management and public accounting firms, HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, part of which addresses health data’s privacy and security) or some other requirement specific to your industry or location, you need to consider how to your reporting will need to comply. And you need to think about that before you begin the reporting process – it starts when you gather data. Make sure you have the necessary information stored correctly in order to report on it.