The 4 essential steps to create your reporting
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We addressed it in previous articles; a dashboard is a great help in decision-making and very effective. Intended for the entire team (business leader, manager, etc.), this tool provides a synthetic view of the essential points for the functioning of the company. However, implementing a reporting system in an organization is not an easy task, even less so for quality reporting. Here you will find the 4 essential steps to create your own reporting.
Step 1 : Defining objectives
Reporting is an indispensable tool to help leaders measure and better understand the evolution of their activity. It is a true decision-support tool. Used in various fields, it serves to monitor the evolution of an activity or service in order to anticipate and adapt the functioning of the company. It is also used to track the costs of an activity or service to allocate the company’s available resources (man-hours, financing, skills, raw materials, etc.) in the best possible way.
The various missions of reporting in the company :
Reveal the strengths and weaknesses of a company: It allows for changes to be made to improve the observed weaknesses.
Reveal potential market opportunities.
Track the implementation of your action plans at different stages and improve them if necessary.
Inform teams about a situation (upcoming/current developments, company news…)
As with your company's performance objectives, you must clearly define the objectives of your reporting and dashboards. This is an important step not to be missed. Here are some additional questions you can ask yourself to help define your objectives: Who are the recipients? Do they already use a reporting system? Are they comfortable with these tools? What types of dashboards do they need? What information do they require?
Step 2 : The performance indicators to track
Once your objectives are set, it's time to define the indicators you will need to measure to analyze your company's performance. There are 3 main types of indicators:
Financial indicators: net profit, gross margin, purchase price of raw materials, EBITDA, working capital needs, break-even point…
Activity indicators: turnover, number of products sold vs. number of products created…
Quality indicators: number of complaints, call answering rate, non-conformity rate…
Depending on the nature of the company, the indicators to be monitored will not be the same and will have different priorities. For example, the hotel industry needs to know the occupancy rate of rooms, REVPAR, the cost of an empty room, the cost of raw materials for breakfasts… Meanwhile, e-commerce platforms will primarily seek to establish the turnover achieved by type of products sold, the number of items added to the cart, the cart abandonment rate...
Step 3 : Regularly updating the data
The right frequency of updates can be difficult to establish. To find it, here are some questions to ask yourself: over what average period are the results likely to be more telling? At what deadlines will the observed performances allow you to act?
Sometimes, it may be more interesting to monitor your data over several weeks or months, rather than simply analyzing your performances weekly or daily.
Step 4 : Designing reporting
Choosing the technical solution
While Excel is the ideal tool for starting out in reporting, it quickly becomes an obsolete tool once you need in-depth analysis of your data. To overcome Excel's shortcomings, there are integrated solutions for your management software, as well as SaaS solutions. The important thing is that the selected tool is user-friendly and effective. The interface should be designed to allow for a good user experience, with charts that are pleasant to consult and understandable at a glance. A user-friendly interface, pleasant-to-read charts... These elements play a significant role in the adoption of the tool.
Identifying data sources
What data will you need to collect? What sources contain this data? The idea at this stage is to identify all data sources that will feed your dashboards (CRM, banks, commercial management software, accounting software, social media, mailing software, etc.) In practice, you should list all the software or applications you are using. Then ask yourself if the data they contain is important for analyzing your performance.
The structure of reporting
The layout and organization of information within the dashboard are essential in order to obtain a simple, coherent, and effective whole ! And this structure is unique to each company. There are several ways to present information on your dashboard (by group of indicators, by level of detail, by causal link).
You now know the steps to follow to create your own reporting, so it’s your turn to play !
