In terms of company management, reporting and dashboarding are essential tools for any organisation wishing to improve its daily performance. However, they are sometimes confused, and their respective roles are not always well understood… In order to see things more clearly, let’s take stock of the main differences between these two tools, but also of their complementarity.
What are reporting and dashboards?
Before discussing the main differences between reporting and dashboarding, it is important to define these two concepts.
Reporting taking stock of the company’s activity
Reporting is a comprehensive account that provides an overview of the activity of the company, a department, or a subsidiary.
It is therefore a snapshot in time, focusing on a specific period. Moreover, it presents raw information that needs to be analysed and highlighted to be truly exploitable.
The dashboard for real-time control
The dashboard is a business management tool that provides real and immediate decision support.
Unlike reporting, it contains real-time data to monitor the day-to-day performance of an activity, project, or department. The information is prioritised and presented in the form of a set of key performance indicators (KPIs) that are easy to interpret.
In this way, the company can make progress towards its strategic objectives while implementing corrective actions if necessary. It can be specific to certain areas of the company, for example the HR dashboard, the marketing dashboard or the sales dashboard…
The main differences between reporting and dashboarding
The shape
Reporting and dashboarding are distinguished firstly by their form. In general, the former is a document generated in PDF or PPT format, containing both text and graphics. It is not interactive, since it presents information relating to a past period.
The management dashboard is an interactive tool that brings together performance measurement indicators and visual representations for an immediate understanding of the information. Designed with Business Intelligence software, it allows data to be explored and analysed, and updated continuously.
Completeness
In many cases, reporting is a very detailed document, which provides an exhaustive description of the activity of the company or a department.
In contrast, the dashboard is much more synthetic and focuses on a specific theme, in order to monitor performance at a glance. However, it is recommended not to present more than 10 indicators per dashboard.
The objectives
Mainly intended for managers and business units, reporting provides an overall view of the actions taken by the company and their impact over a defined period. It enables the identification of major trends, the study of problems, the establishment of forecasts, etc. It is therefore a tool that is resolutely oriented towards the long term.
The objectives of a management dashboard are different, as it is designed to facilitate short-term decision-making. Indeed, the information is prioritised to highlight the most important indicators. Thanks to the data updated in real time, it also allows teams to act proactively.
Setting up a reporting system is about collecting and processing data, while creating a dashboard is about analysing the data to support decision-making.
How to combine reporting and dashboarding?
Despite their differences, reporting and the dashboard are not opposites: they are complementary tools that must be used together to exploit their full potential.
Indeed, the development of a dashboard is necessarily based on the prior analysis of the reporting, which makes it possible to identify problems, trends, but also and above all the objectives to be achieved. The company can then define relevant key indicators (KPIs) to manage its performance on a daily basis.
Nevertheless, to effectively combine reporting and dashboarding, it is essential to fulfil some prerequisites.
Reliable and centralised data
There’s one notable common point between dashboards and reporting: both tools must be based on quality data to be truly effective. Hence, the importance of centralising, cleansing and structuring the data before analysing it.
By making its data more reliable, the company can use it to improve its performance and increase its turnover, while considerably reducing the risk of misinterpretation.
To achieve this, it can rely on business intelligence software or a reporting tool that automatically processes the data. The organisation can then draw all the benefits from its reporting and decision-making dashboards.
Well-defined objectives
In order to exploit the full potential of the reporting and the dashboard, their respective tasks must be clearly defined. Employees at all levels of the company must be able to differentiate between them and use them appropriately, knowing which tool is best suited to each situation.
To achieve this, it is essential to define their use, their form, their frequency, their level of detail and also their target audience. In this way, the functions and objectives of each tool are clearly separated, enabling both employees and managers to benefit from their complementarity.
Sometimes confused, reporting and the dashboard are two tools in their own right, which differ in form and content. But their real strength lies in their complementarity: hence the interest in understanding their characteristics and using them jointly to benefit from enlightened company management.