Every business is rife with data, from customer interactions and purchase history to website visits, product and service sales to support ticket topics—and much more. But raw data is of no use if its insights go untapped, which is why data reporting has become an essential tool in a business’s arsenal. Insights gleaned from these tools can improve workflow processes, products, services, and business outcomes and success.
As businesses continue to generate more and more data, the importance of implementing efficient data reporting is at an all-time high. To harness its potential, the following best practices for data reporting should be taken into consideration.
Best practices: data reporting broken down
Using effective data reporting and integration tools, your business can turn raw data from various sources into an understandable and approachable report. These reports can be immensely helpful to your coworkers, managers, executives, investors, clients, and customers.
Choosing your data must be intentional. Not every report benefits every audience, which is why you need to carefully choose and curate the data you use. You need to know whom each report is for, how it can be helpful for them, and why.
To create the most effective data reports, follow these best practices:
Data quality and governance:
- Review data sources: Decide which data sources you will use for reporting.
- Ensure data quality and consistency: Before any reports are made, make sure the data is regularly cleaned and validated so the data is consistent. Errors and missing data should be addressed. There are often empty files or files that have been unnecessarily duplicated. You can use integration tools to clean the data and address errors. This makes the process more efficient and accurate and improves data storage efficiency.
- Data quality checks: Implement a process to regularly assess data quality. This should be done throughout the data collection and analysis processes.
- Data governance: Create policies and procedures for data access, security, and usage to ensure safe data practices.
Data choices
- Decide on goals and purpose: Before creating any reports, you and your team need to decide on your objectives for utilizing data reporting. Figure out key performance indicators (KPIs) that make sense for your unique business. What are you hoping to achieve with these insights? Make sure your reports address these questions.
- Determine your users and audience: Who will use the data reporting tools to create reports, for whom are the reports created, and which departments need these insights to thrive? Depending on the type of report, audiences may include direct managers, team members who need data to improve their work, C-level executives, investors, clients, and even customers.
- Choose the data: Decide what data you want to be analyzed and interpreted. Hone in on what points need to be displayed and stay focused. With some reports, broad overviews are desirable, while others need to be more granular.
- Make insights easy to understand: Choose how you want your data reports presented. Whether through a chart, graph, map, or some other means of visual reporting, you can make data easier to understand for yourself and your audience. Even complex information can become more easily digestible when presented in the right way.
- Make final tweaks to the report: Review your report and make any final adjustments before you present the report to your audience.
Automation
- Data pipelines: To make your data collection, processes, and analysis seamless, data workflows should be established to ensure efficiency.
- Automate your reports: Using a reporting tool where you can automate reports, you can create the parameters you want included and schedule regular reports. This significantly minimizes the time needed to create regular reports.
- Real-time updates: When you need live data updates to stay as relevant as possible, you can use live data feeds for next-to-instantaneous reporting.
Manage reporting processes:
- Review: Create a schedule for occasionally reviewing data reporting processes. As your business needs change, whether from growth or other factors, it’s important to ensure your reporting processes still provide beneficial information.
- Updates: Stay on top of necessary software updates that help your data reporting tools work properly.
- User access: Periodically, take inventory of who has access to the data, reporting tools, and reports. There may be individuals who no longer need access or some who don’t that should be granted access. For example, whenever someone no longer works at the company, their access should be revoked.
- Encourage feedback: To make sure your reports and reporting tools are beneficial to workers and audiences, ask for feedback. What other information should be included on reports? Is the reporting tool meeting your business’s needs? Is it easy enough to use? Do certain workers need help or training to know how to use it effectively?
Ready to learn how you can implement these practices in your business?
Data reporting processes are highly beneficial—and necessary—to your business’ success.
In our next article, learn more about data reporting and how it relates to business intelligence. Click here to read. (link to next CC5 article)
If you’d like to learn more about how SmartConnect and Popdock, eOne’s integration tools, can help your team access, transform, and report on data, contact our sales team at sales@eonesolutions.com or 888-319-3663 ext. 1.