Reporting tools are extremely useful for the day-to-day management of your business, and have become an essential ally for companies seeking to improve their performance. But with a multitude of players vying for a share of the market, how can you be sure you’re making the right choice and integrating a solution that’s really tailored to your needs?
What is a reporting tool?
Reporting is an analysis and decision-making tool that enables executives and managers to extract relevant data about an organisation’s situation. It generally focuses on a specific period, with the data presented in such a way as to be easy to read and interpret.
Reporting is essential for assessing a company’s health and performance. It’s a snapshot of the situation at any given moment, highlighting what’s working, but also identifying areas for vigilance and improvement.
It is a genuine means of communication between decision-makers, employees and other stakeholders in the company, and can be used in many areas: finance, human resources, marketing, sales, etc. Furthermore, it is very useful for taking stock of the progress of a project, measuring the effectiveness of a strategy, and also for ensuring that the strategy is in line with the objectives set.
However, creating reports manually is as complex as it is time-consuming. That’s why many companies are turning to a reporting tool, sometimes integrated with a Business Intelligence solution, to automate this task and improve efficiency. By centralising data and translating it into reports and tables, this software is essential for monitoring the company’s activity in real time.
7 criteria for choosing a reporting tool
While the usefulness of a reporting tool is well established, choosing the right software for your needs and requirements is no easy task. To help you see things more clearly, let’s have a look at the main criteria to consider when making the right decision.
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Functional scope
When it comes to deciding a reporting software package, you need to pay particular attention to the functionalities offered by the tool. It needs to cover all user requires if it is to be widely adopted, while meeting your specific requirements and problems.
Here are some of the essential features of a reporting solution to help you see things more clearly.
Data analysis
The main objective of a reporting tool is to transform raw, disparate data into usable information. It must therefore enable everyone to explore and analyse the data on their own, even if they have no technical skills.
Data visualisation
Data visualisation involves representing data in the form of graphs, histograms, tables, or maps. It simplifies the understanding and analysis of information, by making data more digestible and usable by users. With just a few clicks, data visualisation allows you to take stock of your performance in a clear and precise way.
Static reports
Creating a static report is ideal for obtaining an immediate overview of your situation at a given point in time. It’s a snapshot in time, allowing you to analyse historical data at a later date.
But it also provides useful information for long-term project management, such as budget planning or strategy development. This type of report can be easily exported in Microsoft Excel or PowerPoint format.
Ad hoc reports
Ad hoc reports are one-off reports generated in response to a specific problem that the company has not been able to resolve with a traditional report. They are entirely customised, offering a detailed analysis of a specific query or measure. Their scope is therefore limited to a restricted subset of data.
Dashboards
Reporting tools generally include dashboards, which display information updated in real time. They are essential for decision-making, because they enable you to act on the basis of relevant data. Conversely, the data contained in a static report will sooner or later become obsolete.
Dynamic dashboards allow you to visualise and monitor your business from every angle, as well as quickly spotting trends or anomalies. For example, if there is a sudden drop in a key performance indicator (KPI), you can analyse the data to understand the causes.
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Performance
A good reporting tool must be a robust, high-performance solution capable of managing large volumes of data from a wide range of sources (both internal and external to the company). The collection, processing and updating of data must be fluid and automated, to save you time on a day-to-day basis.
You should also take into account the software’s ability to instantly provide tables, graphs, spreadsheets or more advanced visual representations. Similarly, the tool must be able to adapt to the periodicity of your analyses, whether it is occasional, weekly, monthly or quarterly reporting.
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Ease of use
When choosing your reporting software, look for a user-friendly solution that users will be able to get to grips with quickly. A user-friendly, ergonomic interface and clear, comprehensible functions are essential if you want your staff to want to use the tool.
All members of the team, whether experts or novices, must be able to create reports, manipulate them and, above all, understand their content. What’s more, the information obtained must be easy to share between users.
Before deployment, it may be useful to test the software on a small scale, for example by taking advantage of a free version. This experimentation phase is particularly useful for answering the following questions:
- Is the reporting tool accessible to non-specialists with no particular technical skills?
- Can it generate reports at the desired frequency?
- Does it integrate easily with the company’s other tools (project management software, ERP, customer relationship management tools, etc.)?
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Customisation
As its name suggests, a good reporting tool should allow you to create reports as you wish. In fact, their format must be adapted to your needs if the data is to be truly exploitable.
Hence, the importance of choosing software that offers advanced customisation options, allowing data to be viewed in different forms and varying graphic representations.
The possibilities for collaborative working must also be studied: can several people interact with the same report and make personal changes to it? If so, how are access rights managed?
Finally, the tool must offer various options for exporting, printing and sharing reports.
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Speed of deployment
Ideally, the reporting tool should be “plug and play”, meaning that it is immediately operational. In concrete terms, the software must recognise the format of the data to be analysed, but also integrate seamlessly with the other applications used by the company. In this way, you can quickly exploit all its functionalities, without having to follow a laborious installation procedure.
The speed of deployment also depends on the amount of training required to get to grips with the tool: hence the importance of opting for an intuitive, easy-to-use solution. Whatever the case, the time spent on integration must be commensurate with your needs and your project.
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Scalability
Don’t forget that choosing a reporting tool is a long-term decision. That’s why it’s important to opt for a scalable solution that can adapt as your organisation grows and its needs change.
This means that the software must be capable of easily adding new functions, while maintaining exemplary performance and stability. Here, ongoing maintenance and updating of the tool are essential: so it’s best to turn to a recognised publisher with overall expertise in Big Data and data analysis.
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Safety
The final point to bear in mind when selecting a reporting tool is security.
While this is a significant issue for any software, it is particularly relevant for reporting solutions, which directly tap into (sometimes sensitive) company data. The stakes are high: the consequences of data loss can be disastrous for your reputation, not to mention the financial losses involved.
That’s why you need to choose a reliable publisher that uses strict security protocols and places data confidentiality at the top of its priorities. There are a number of areas that deserve particular attention: access management, compliance with the RGPD and other regulations in force, and the hosting of data on a secure, sovereign cloud.
So you can be sure that your sensitive or critical data is in safe hands.
While there are many criteria for deciding a reporting tool, functional richness, performance, and scalability are among the key elements of a quality solution. Therefore, it is important to opt for a comprehensive business intelligence tool that includes reporting functions as well as other possibilities to get the most out of your data.
Want to go further? Discover the 15 essential criteria for choosing Business Intelligence software.
