How to Create a Useful Business Report
We've all seen them -- reports that are misleading, poorly organized, and look as if the person who designed them was getting paid by the character. Heck, maybe you've even written those reports. But we're not here to judge. We're here to help.
You can guarantee useful reports by paying attention to the following key features: accuracy, completeness, relevance, visual interest, timeliness and clarity.
Accuracy
We all understand that if a report's data isn’t accurate, it’s useless. You wouldn’t want to rely on a report that, say, showed sales had increased by 2 percent after an advertising blitz if the increase really were 20 percent.
One way to safeguard data accuracy is to use a reporting solution where data flows directly out of the data source into the report. This direct process ensures a level of security because it takes humans out of the equation. When you don’t re-key figures, data is inherently more accurate and dependable.
If you're not using reporting software and absolutely must enter data manually, be sure to double-check, triple-check and quadruple-check your figures. Better yet, have someone else double-check, triple-check and quadruple-check your figures. You don't want a $2.6 Billion Mistake arising from a simple data entry error.
Completeness
Pulling data directly from a database may safeguard data accuracy, but it doesn’t mean you're getting all the data you need. And in our digitized world, dealing with machine-readable data can be a challenge and may lead to missing data.
Many reports are the summary of disparate bits of data. Say you're creating reports that display financial data spanning long time periods. The data may come from several different types of databases, and it may be in a variety of formats.
Make sure your reporting software allows you include all the types of data you have and lets you pull data from multiple sources. And if your software doesn't, ask yourself how long it would take to convert your data and whether it might be more cost-efficient to invest in a new software package.
Relevance
But remember that with data, you can have too much of a good thing. You need access to the complete dataset, but you must be able to select only relevant information. You don't want to be sharing sensitive, confidential or otherwise inappropriate data. (Yes, Sharing Information Inappropriately can cost you your job)
Suppose you're presenting a report at a professional conference. You must be able to show results without sacrificing the privacy of the data. It’s crucial that you a) know what key data must be included, and b) have the ability to filter data.
You can get the full version of The Importance Of Data Representation white paper from our sponsor Windward Reports.
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