Mid-level personnel, particularly finance personnel, spend a lot of time in creating reports using MS Excel. Most of these reports cater to the monthly reporting structure required by the management of the Company or some ad-hoc request within/outside the organization.
While the reports address the issue raised, do they add any real value? Is it worth the time of the professional? Are they hired to carry out these repetitive tasks? Can they be more efficient? Is there a better way to design these reports so as to remove the need for all these ad-hoc reports to a large extent? Can these reports be automated? The answer to all these questions and many more is a resounding yes!!
There are many Business Intelligence tools today which will help you to design user-defined reports. These tools are readily available, have enough material on the web for anyone to learn and there’re many external freelancers who would this for you at a nominal cost.
The one major change the organisation will have to do is, “think before you act”. While everyone swears by this, in real life, very few practice it. To reap the real benefits of any kind of automation is thinking before spending time on the activity. Define the goal, break it down in to distinct phases, have a deadline for each of the phases.. etc., A typical project management approach.
Advantages of having professionally designed reports: –
- The reports are interactive, one could literally talk to reports
- One could design different dashboards for different departments/persons so that the user will have the most relevant info on their screens
- The reports are generated within minutes of the raw data being updated
- The reports could be changed at a few clicks and can be used to build scenarios
- The reports can have multiple data sources
- The reports are live, can be shown on the mobile app
- Saves a lot of time for the entire organization which could be further used to analyze the reports
- Better productivity and morale of employees
- Since the reports are live, everyone in the organization is on their toes to deliver quality data on time.
There are many more benefits of automating your periodical reports. Needless to say, this is the future and we should all aspire to be there.
HP & Associates can help you to design and implement these reports in a short time. In case of any queries, please do reach out to us at piyush.hundia@hpassociates.in
HPA - Business & Financial Consulting 