How to Boost Business Reporting With Report Automation?

The idea of driving business outcomes with actionable insights is appealing, but the real struggle lies in connecting data and turning resultant analytics into action.

Irrespective of the type and size of business, organisations have a tidal wave of data waiting to be analysed for information and insights. Most businesses rely on manual reporting to arrive at meaningful, contextual, and novelty-revealing insights and analytics from this data. This manual process is then repeated over and over again at a preferred cadence until the report owner moves on to a different organisation and leaves behind just memories of how the report was built or refreshed in the past.

Truth is, actionable insights become another meaningless buzzword when manual business reporting fails. So, how do you generate strategically aligned insights with less effort toward manual reporting? The answer lies in intelligent business report automation. 

If you are spending too much time generating business reports manually, struggling to track metrics & KPIs, and tired of maintaining reports on excel sheets, this blog on report automation is for you. Time to dive deep into the nuances of automated reports and how they can help you unlock unrealised business potential.

What is Report Automation?

Report automation or reporting automation refers to the automated process of fetching data (structured or unstructured), extracting insights from it, generating reports, and delivering them to stakeholders based on preset rules and delivery schedules. The ultimate goal of reporting automation is to free up your employees’ time, analyse business data, and deliver actionable insights for decision-making.

Automated reporting systems rely on cutting-edge technology including predictive analytics to deliver data narratives in a simpler way. Plus, you get to access real-time data dashboards which makes it easier for you to make data-driven decisions. 

So, what can you exactly do using these reporting automation tools? Here’s a sneak-peek into their capabilities:

• Data Extraction, Cleansing, and Modelling: The majority of the report writing tools allow users to extract data from disparate sources, clean and transform data, and then model the data in dimensions and facts. This process not only makes it easier to build reports but also increases the accuracy of the underlying data. 
   
• Report Writing: Most of the reporting automation tools come equipped with narrative reporting features that have built-in report writing capabilities for sourcing data in charts and tabular grids from different platforms.
   
• Existing Report Migration: This feature allows you to import existing Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or PDF-based reports for narrative reporting and analysis. 
   
• Data and Narrative Content Combination: This is a must-have feature when you work with financial statements. It makes it easier for a business to combine financial data with text narratives and create a single report for better contextual understanding. 
   
• Secure Collaboration: Whether you want multiple experts to collaborate for creating a report, a review approval process flow, or a review version control management system, secure collaboration is the feature that facilitates it all.
   
• Report Creation & Distribution: Reporting automation tools also come with the capability to create & group reports, distribute them, and make them accessible from different devices. 
   
• Internal and External Reporting Requirement Fulfilment: Narrative reporting tools make it effortless for you to fulfil different reporting requirements including internal management reporting, country by country reporting (CbCr) regulations, XBRL reporting mandates, tax reporting, other compliance reporting and so on.
   
• Automation & Workflow Orchestration: Automated reporting tools also automate repetitive tasks and orchestrate workflows to ensure that the entire reporting process remains connected with less human intervention. 

4 Types of Reporting Automation Tools

It becomes easier to choose the right reporting automation tool when you have a holistic understanding of your reporting requirements. Here are 4 types of automated reporting tools categorised based on budget, coding skills, and integrations. 

1. Code-based

Code-based report automation tools are ideal for teams with experience in scripting and debugging codes. These tools give you the flexibility to customise your reporting system based on business reporting needs. For example, platforms that can run SQL queries belong to this category. Dash Enterprise from Ploty is another example where one will need to code using the Python Dash framework to build visually appealing reports.

2. Low Code or No Code

Low code or no code reporting automation tools are easy-to-use and don’t need your team to have programming expertise. These tools mostly rely on graphical user interface (GUI) elements and drag-and-drop functionalities to fetch data, generate reports, and deliver them. Customisation options are limited with this kind of software. Xplenty is a data integration/ETL/ELT platform and comes with low-code/no-code options.

3. Business Intelligence

Business intelligence (BI)-enabled reporting automation tools come with robust capabilities to extract insights from business data. They allow you to aggregate, analyse, and visualise data with interactive dashboards. Your team will need to be trained to be able to interpret output reports on these platforms. Tableau, Power BI are examples of good business intelligence tools. 

4. KPI Dashboards

KPI dashboard tools are ideal for real-time data visualisations of business metrics and key performance indicators. These tools are comparatively easier to set up and may require you to go through training. The popular Google Analytics alternative Matomo is a KPI dashboard tool. 

4 Benefits of Using A Reporting Automation Tool

Now that you know what reporting automation is and the types of report automation tools available, it’s time to understand why you should be using such a tool in the first place. If you have been managing business reporting manually, here are the benefits you can realise with automated reporting.

1. Save Time & Money

Both time and money are of colossal importance in any business. 

When your team manually adds, updates, or tracks data, they spend time on tasks that have less strategic value. The biggest benefit of automating report creation and insights extraction is that you get to have accurate data-driven insights while your team participates in more productive and value-added activities. 

Manual processes are also highly error-prone and therefore can create inefficiencies. You can easily avoid these detrimental situations by implementing report automation. 

2. Improve Productivity

Reporting automation tools centralise the entire process of collecting, storing, and analysing data. This means everyone in your organisation has access to reliable and accurate data for performing better. 

Also, this collaborative environment helps your employees to support team discussions and brainstorming sessions with relevant data and insights. 

3. Get Real-time Insights for Decision-making

Ever struggled with cumbersome reporting that made it almost impossible to decode the data insights generated? That’s one of the biggest challenges of manual reporting. 

Reporting automation tools present data analysis and insights in a visual format that’s easy to understand. They enable you to track KPI metrics and make decisions in real-time. This is particularly helpful in situations that require you to make informed decisions for emerging issues. 

4. Drive Innovation & Business Growth

In today’s competitive business landscape, it’s more important than ever to drive business growth with innovation. Reporting automation software help you to achieve that with 24/7 access to real-time data and insights. It makes it super easy for you to manage constant changes and be innovative at the same time. 

Steps to Streamlined Reporting Automation: A Step-by-step Guide

Reporting automation makes business reporting simpler, efficient, and error-free. 

What goes away is the exhausting process of manually adding data, verifying/analysing them, creating reports, and not to mention the manual follow-up asking teams to update data before the deadline. There could be more to the list: conflicting report copies, inaccurate data, difficult to understand dashboards, and whatnot. 

But, how does a reporting automation tool do everything so seamlessly while maintaining accuracy? In this section, dive deep into how reporting automation goes through multiple steps to streamline the entire business reporting process. 

• Data Pulling: Report automation tools use data loader to auto-pull data from multiple business tools, platforms, and repositories. As the data gets automatically updated, it changes actual values, target values, and charts. Since this cycle of data pulling and analysis happens in real-time or in batch mode, users always have access to up-to-date charts, data, reports, and evaluations. You can also set up custom alerts for specific changes in data and analysis. 
   
• Data Update Reminders: Report automation software can also efficiently automate the process of sending data update reminders to different teams. Depending on organisational needs, you can set this up so that the team can upload additional details on time. The automated emails can be customised to add access links, a list of items to be uploaded, and so on.
   
• Reporting Period Locked: Once users receive automated reminders, they can log into the report automation software to update relevant data. Now, each user, based on the access level, will have a customised view of the data that they need to upload. The software will also show a deadline to complete these updates. For teams who didn’t notice the first reminder or needed more time to make updates, you can schedule a second reminder as well. At the final step of the data entry, reporting automation tools let you set a data entry deadline after which no data can be manually added or updated by teams. This offers the senior leadership team the time needed to discover insights and prepare an execution plan. 
   
• Report Generation & Review: During this step, the reporting automation tool will send automatically generated reports to different stakeholders, based on the preset rules. Administrators can easily customise these reports for ease of understanding. At this stage, admins can also adjust data, if needed.
   
• Briefing Book Generation: Once reports are generated and reviewed, reporting automation tools generate the briefing book which is sent to the senior leadership team. This helps them to prepare for discussing strategy during the meeting instead of discovering surprises. 
   
• Action Item Capturing: During the strategy review meeting, you can capture different action items, add them to projects, and set assignees using the reporting automation tool. At the end of the meeting, all these items are collected in the action item briefing book and sent to the relevant teams. 

That’s the beauty of reporting automation. Every step starting from data collection to analysis to briefing book generation becomes so streamlined that your employees can focus on driving strategic initiatives for improved business performance.

Financial Reporting Automation: What It Is and Why It's Important

Among the myriad of functions that you can leverage reporting automation for, finance continues to be the most important one for enterprises. That’s because maintaining budgeting, financial plan reporting, and consolidation is truly a gruelling affair. 

Finance team employees need to manage multiple complex tasks and activities including but not limited to data extraction/loading/transformation, line item calculation, cost driver updation and report creation/distribution. 

Making your finance reporting timely and accurate is crucial for closing transparency and making effective decisions. Here’s how financial report automation helps you at granular levels:

• Reduces Reporting Time: Today’s enterprises need different types of reports starting from standard reports to P&L reports to ad hoc reports to variance reports and the list goes on. Financial reporting automation software reduces this time to create reports by integrating with other business platforms like ERP and EPM. 
   
• Checks Comparability and Compatibility: Collecting data for reporting itself is a time-consuming process. Add to that the amount of time required to check comparability and compatibility. Reporting automation tools can easily automatically check data usability for analytics with standard methods and pre-set rules. 
   
• Analysis & Insights: Ideally, there is no use of financial data unless you can gain strategic insights out of it. Reporting automation systems leverage machine learning (ML) to study decision-making patterns, find insights, and predict future performance. 
   
• Lowers Finance Workload: The best part of using finance reporting automation tools is that they significantly free up the valuable time of your finance team. Whether you want to create reports compliant with generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), international financial reporting standards (IFRS), or reach a goal based on a uniform database, reporting automation tools can take care of it all.
   
• Identifies Data Discrepancies: Finance reporting automation systems also let you compare data at different levels for analysis. Also, you can integrate them with Tableau, Power BI, or other business intelligence tools for advanced analysis and insights. 

Now that you know how automation can revolutionise accounting and finance reporting, let’s take a look at the common processes that you can automate with finance report automation tools:

• Journal Entry: Journal entry refers to the process of validating data, correcting errors, and uploading approvals to an ERP system. When done manually, it often delays the collation of data from all business sources.
  
  With reporting automation, you can automate the entire process of creating, updating, and approving journals. Now, you can also set dynamic rules for these journals to be added to the ledger system or ERP solution. When automated, this entire process can help you avoid manual errors, boost business performance, and decision making. 
   
• Expense Management: Tracking employees’ spending, processing employee expense claims, and reimbursements are usually done manually at most organisations. Now, managing spreadsheets for expense tracking and dealing with receipts often becomes a time-consuming and error-prone affair. With finance reporting automation, you can easily collect, store, process, and create reports on employee and business spending without having to worry about making errors. 
   
• Intercompany Management: Enterprises having multiple business units often struggle with different accounting and finance systems, leading to inaccurate accrual and balance journals. With reporting automation, you can automate the process of financial data consolidation and intercompany procurement. 
   
• Financial Close: Businesses using spreadsheets heavily rely on manual efforts to achieve financial closing. The fact that your employees have to coordinate with different departments often leads to data inaccuracy and therefore processing delays. With financial report automation, you can have complete visibility of disparate information and achieve reduced administration errors.
   
• Credit Control: A seamless credit control process helps you to streamline debt recovery and maintain a consistent cash flow. From a reporting automation perspective, you can benefit from automated aged debtor reports which collect and present the data on overdue amounts.

How to Select the Reporting Automation Tool That's Best For You?

Understanding what you can achieve with reporting automation software helps you to decide the tool that would work for you. So, what are the factors to consider while selecting and implementing automated reporting solutions? 

• Data Formats: Since business data comes in different formats including excel sheets, relational databases etc., you must ensure that your reporting automation tool supports all these data source formats. Also, it’s necessary for this software to have the ability to process both structured and unstructured data. 
   
• Reporting Needs: Perhaps the most important factor that you need to consider while choosing a tool is organisational reporting needs. For example, business intelligence tools may be a better choice for extracting website data and creating intuitive dashboards for easier decision-making whereas RPA-enable reporting automation tools are perfect for extracting information from unstructured financial documents like invoices and statements. 
   
• Data Source Integrations: For your business reporting to be automated, you’ll need powerful integrations that can aggregate business data from multiple sources. That’s why it’s necessary to choose a reporting automation software that comes with the ability to handle out of the box integrations. 
   
• Programming Skills: You also need to consider the programming skills of your team before choosing a reporting automation software. Dashboard tools are ideal for teams with less technical expertise and code-based tools for techy teams. 

Business Intelligence vs. Automated Reporting: Can They Work Together?

Both business intelligence and automated reporting tools help you to improve business performance. 

While reporting automation software enables you to produce reports faster, business intelligence tools are crucial for exploring data and automating reports based on these explorations.

Business intelligence is perfect for taking proactive decisions based on data collected from multiple sources such as CRM, sales, and so on. The ultimate goal of business intelligence tools is to offer meaningful insights that help you understand what’s performing, what’s not, and why.

Ideally, it’s best to choose a business intelligence system with built-in automated reporting capabilities. That way you can enjoy the best of both worlds. The biggest benefit will be that you will be using a single data repository and the entire team will have a single source of truth (SSOT), and all these while report creation/distribution is completely automated. However, in reality for a large enterprise, it is completely normal to have a business intelligence tool servicing internal reporting requirements (both management reporting and ad-hoc analysis) for the users whilst a reporting automation tool being used for meeting the external reporting needs (financial, regulatory and compliance reporting). 

NeeVista Recommends: Top 4 Reporting Automation Tools

NeeVista consultants have helped enterprises, SMBs, and startups automate business reporting throughout the last decade. Here are 4 reporting automation platforms they recommend from their years of experience in understanding diverse business reporting needs and fulfilling them with automation:

1. Workiva

Workiva is a popular reporting automation tool that facilitates seamless data orchestration among business systems and applications for connected reporting and compliance. 

This report automation solution is ideal for financial services, accounting, legal, and FP&A teams working in industries like banking, government, higher education, insurance, retail, and so on. 

Their powerful platform makes it easier for you to:

• Facilitate cloud-based collaboration on a single unified platform
• Access an easy-to-use and intuitive platform for getting the process up and running
• Leverage auto-feed between spreadsheets, presentations, and documents
• Connect financial data from multiple sources like ERP and general ledgers
• Have complete visibility into the financial audit trail process with change logs
• Increase speed to insights for faster and accurate decision-making
• Run data mapping in minutes instead of using spreadsheets 
• Link all data elements with calculations and narrative in one place

2. Oracle Narrative Reporting

Oracle Narrative Reporting helps you to meet internal and external reporting requirements and automates the entire process of creating reports from reviewing them to publishing them with regulatory reports. 

Some of the important capabilities of Oracle Narrative Reporting are:

• Ability to collaborate with data across Oracle and non-Oracle sources
• Power to combine data and narrative content
• Built-in report writing for sourcing charts and grids from multiple sources
• Cross-team collaboration for review management and multiple author involvement
• Ability to create report books, distribute them, and access reports on the go
• Ability to create country by country reporting (CbCr) for tax regulators

3. Tableau 

Tableau is a popular business intelligence tool that makes it easier for you to collect, prepare, visualise, and analyse data. Tableau reporting allows you to see data trends, analyse forecasts, or slice & dice data as per business needs. 

Here are some of the key features that make Tableau the most widely adopted business intelligence reporting tool:

• Easy collaboration among peers or users for collaborative work or reviews
• 200+ connectors for seamless connection to external data sources
• Several monitoring features including data monitoring, auto-refresh, and so on
• Advanced methods for data visualisation i.e. are chart, bar chart, bubble cloud, etc.
• Advanced visualisation capabilities for reporting via charts, tables, graphs, and maps
• Self-explaining dashboard wizards with drag and drop options for creating visualisations

4. PowerBI

Microsoft PowerBI is another business analytics tool that can help you meet business reporting requirements with interactive visualisations and business intelligence capabilities. With up-to-date analytics, PowerBI enables organisations to accomplish self-service analytics, find meaningful insights, and protect data with end-to-end encryption.

Here’s why many enterprises prefer PowerBI for their data analytics and reporting needs:

• Ability to share interactive data visualisations across different user groups
• Improved publishing capability with simple cues in deployment pipelines
• A unified platform for managing self-service and enterprise data analytics
• Real-time analytics for easy understanding of what’s happening across business functions
• Capability to connect, combine, and analyse the entire data state for pixel-perfect reporting
• An application lifecycle management (ALM) along with an open connectivity framework
• Faster insights from structured and unstructured data with Microsoft AI-enabled machine learning models 
• Unparalleled excel interpolation for easy connecting Excel queries, data models, and reports
• Ease of building business applications and automating workflows with Power Apps and Power Automate

Artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled business reporting is crucial for disrupting business reporting, boosting productivity, and driving organisational performance. Whether you are looking for the best technology partner for financial close and financial planning & Analysis reporting, or need to transform existing business reporting processes, get in touch with a personalised consultation on how NeeVista can help you solve some of the most critical report automation challenges.