When we talk about BI reporting almost every company needs it today. BI reporting enables the company’s employees and managers that what is going on at a glance and easily go through the analysis of the underlying data.

BI in a company serves as a fundamental approach that contains all the business insights needed to make informed and intelligent business decisions. It not only boosts business operations with data analytics but also helps in managing and analyzing all the raw data collected from the business.

Businesses now use self-service reporting approaches to get end-to-end solutions for their business and can also reduce IT processes. business intelligence reporting tools play a vital role in converting large and unfiltered data into visual representations along with creating dashboards in less time.

We can say that BI reporting tools, business analytics, data visualization, and data analysis are all part of the business intelligence reporting process. There are many business intelligence reporting tools available online. These tools have prebuilt business intelligence reporting requirements templates with the ability to show the actual representation that the data conveys.

What is BI Reporting?

The term business intelligence reporting or BI reporting is referred to the process of collecting data with the help of various business intelligence tools or software to obtain relevant business insights. Ultimately it provides information or reports to the end-users of organizations through BI software solutions.

The purpose of BI reporting

BI reporting aims to accelerate business performance and provide data insights to support the decision-making process. However, it is the responsibility of the business analyst and IT developers to slice the data and transform the data into business insights and trends. Finally, these reports are used to create a dashboard that can be viewed by decision-making professionals to make informed decisions.

What does a Reporting Analyst do?

The main purpose of a reporting analyst is to assist the business in analyzing metrics and generating reports. They can later communicate these results to business managers and often provide suggestions based on their findings. Reporting analysts are well suited to work in any organization that requires data analysis, from the healthcare industries to financial offices.

Benefits of business intelligence and reporting

Business intelligence and reporting help a company to know the latest trend in the market to stay ahead of its competitors and take appropriate decisions for its companies. Below are some of the benefits that help the company to grow.

Fast and accurate reporting:

The business intelligence reporting process is a fast and accurate reporting process where employees can use prebuilt templates or customized reports to monitor KPIs using a variety of data sources including financial, operations, and sales data. These real-time reports use business-relevant data to make things work more quickly.

Improved data quality

Data is an important asset of any business. Business Intelligence uses to take care of each and every data and keep on filtering the data till all the valuable information is collected from the data.

In a digital business where data is growing rapidly, Business Intelligence will take all the responsibility of your data and provide a real figure from the data in a graphical view.

Business Intelligence reporting is also enabled for viewing on a mobile dashboard, providing 24/7 non-restricted access to essential trends, metrics, and insights. It helps in increasing the productivity in the process and enables to take an informed data-driven decision anytime and anywhere.

Increased operational efficiency

Business intelligence tools also function as an automated reporting process that combines multiple data sources that allow employees and business managers to spend less time manually managing data and focus on producing accurate and timely reports.

Easy Implementation in any industry

Generating a report for different departments within an industry or with different industries can be a daunting task for BI analysts. They need to manage different reporting tools to generate reports for different departments. But Business Intelligence reporting tool works as an all-rounder to present reports for any department or any industry. A business report example might focus on finance, another on sales, a third on marketing. It depends on the specific needs of a company or department.

Identifying market trends

Identifying new market trends and formulating a strategy with supporting data can give your business long-term benefits. Employees by analyzing external market data with internal data to detect new sales trends in order to analyze customer data and market conditions as well as to detect business problems.

Improved, strategic decisions

When you are holding the position of CEO, Senior Executive, or Manager of the company then you have the responsibilities of the company on your shoulders. In this situation, you need to make a better strategic decision that has a positive impact on the company. BI reporting dashboards are intuitive, visual, and provide a wealth of relevant data, allowing you to track trends, identify potential strengths or weaknesses, and uncover baseline insights with ease.

Increased revenue

Increasing revenue is an important goal for any business. Data from BI tools can help businesses ask better questions about why things happened through comparing them across different dimensions and identifying sales weaknesses. When organizations are listening to their customers, looking to their competitors, and improving their operations, revenue is more likely to increase.

Access to real-time and historic data

When the company comes with huge data, it becomes difficult for the manager to deal with it. Traditionally managers have faced such limitations for handling large data sets. But now with the advent of BI reporting, the job has become easier. Modern BI reporting not only gives you access to real-time data but also has the ability to hold years of data.

Choosing the right BI reporting tool

Choosing the right BI tool for your business can be very difficult and time-consuming. Each company is unique and has its own specific BI equipment requirements. But despite this diversity, companies make the same mistakes during the software selection process. We have outlined some important points while deciding on the right BI tool:

Best practice to evaluate BI software involves a multi-step process consisting of the following steps.

• Classification of strategy and goals
• Requirement’s analysis (list of requirements)
• Software/tool evaluation
• Implement the product

Technical Compatibility

Before selecting any BI tools, you need to search does the tool are having all the technical capabilities which fulfill business requirements.

• BI tools must be able to connect multiple data sources (databases)
• Ability to provide high-level, beautiful visualizations, or comprehensive data extraction, or both
• Capable of sharing embedded dashboards, generating daily email reports, email alerts, and self-serve

Reporting Capabilities

Does the tool provide proper reporting and analysis? At the end of the day, if you need to run specific analytics and create specific charts, you need the right tools that can do it.

Collaborative Functionality

The BI tool should have the facility to create and share charts and graphs among teams. This means that we should choose tools that are allies at their core. The ability to create, share, and distribute charts with your team is vital in modern business.

Pricing

Price matters in choosing a BI tool. Here comes the question, are your chosen BI tools worth it? Don’t rush to pick it you need to dig it further for options.

Mobile Friendly

Another must-have feature in your BI tool is the mobile-friendly dashboard. Because many users like to see dashboards and visualization on their mobile phones.

How to get a Perfect BI Report?

Identify reporting requirements

The initial step is to identify your stakeholders, decision-makers, end-users for your report. This is an important process because you need to know who will see your report. This will give you a clear idea about the target audience of your deliverables.

Identify right KPIs and metrics

Once you’ve chosen your target audience, the next important process is identifying the right KPIs and metrics for your reports. Each business can be different from one another, so it is better to choose the right metrics according to your business type.

Choose the right visualization

After selecting the KPIs and Metrics you will now have to select the visualization required for your selected KPIs and Metrics. Many people here failed to select the appropriate visualization. It not only gives you wrong information but also spoils the performance of your business.

Below is the best example to represent the selling trend in a bar chart

Arrange elements in your BI reports

Once you have set up all the above steps, you now need to arrange the elements in an easy-to-understand way to design your report mock-up. We humans always start reading web pages from left to right. As we read the content of the page, our eyes move from left to right, creating an F- or Z-shaped pattern. So always try to position the frequently changing graph from left to right vertex.

Highlight key information

It is a best practice to highlight your key information to make your BI reports and dashboards more engaging and informative. Using the right colors is a powerful way to highlight important information on your BI reports and dashboards.

Grouping related KPIs

BI reports are used to view insights and take recommended actions. It is important that they help end-users make connections within the data quickly. One of the most effective ways to do this is to group your related information and put that information together.

Conclusion

Well-defined BI reporting always benefits the end-user and your business. It not only reduces the daily reporting work but also reduces the employee overhead in managing individual reports for each department. If you’re still engaged in the manual reporting process, register EzInsights for a free trial.