Automated reporting can benefit your business operation in many different ways. Let’s take an example to see why.

Let’s say you are responsible for the sales reports of 10 stores in your county. You are required to make reports of the sales performance of these ten stores every month. Without automated reporting, it usually takes you half of the day to create a single report, and you need a whole week to spend on it. However, with automatic reporting software, you just need to set a template, time frame, and frequency at once, which at most takes half of the day.

Is it amazing? If you are interested in automated reports and how to realize automatic reporting. Don’t miss this article!

In this article, let’s discover how to use the magic of automatic report generation to improve your productivity. Also, I will explain to you the difference between manual, BI, and automated reporting.

Note: The report and dashboard examples in this article are all built-in templates made by FineReport, the leading BI reporting tool in the Asian-Pacific region.

1. What is Automated Reporting?

Automated reporting is the process of generating, regularly updating, and sending reports via a variety of ways according to set intervals or triggered tasks. In detail, with the automatic reporting software, users can set up the time frame, frequency, or triggered events to send the reports at a specific time.

For instance, a scheduled report containing the weekly website traffic can be set to automatically send out every Sunday at 10 pm so that the marketing department can use this report to analyze and discuss the traffic performance timely on Monday morning. 

The Benefits of Automated Reporting

With the automatic reporting function, you can simply generate reports from business data faster and easier without repetitive work.

You can set the formats of your automated reports, such as Excel, Word, or PDF. You can also choose different delivery means, including email, SMS, or platform notification, to send your reports.  

You might be wondering about the time effectiveness of your data:

These reports can be generated or updated by automatically extracting the latest data from the database thanks to the APIs of the automated reporting system. Besides, the reports can be automatically created based on the stunning templates built into the software. 

2. Using Automated Reporting Software to Boost Your Business

Before, we used to automate Excel reports with Python.  But… the work was really time-consuming and highly demanding for the coding base. Making automatic reports with Python is not recommended, especially for non-technical users. Here, I would like to introduce a method to automate the Excel sheets with little coding involved.

Actually, to achieve report automation, only three problems need to be solved: extracting the data, automatically generating reports templates, and sending the reports.

With the advent of automated reporting tools, report automation is much easier than before. Next, let’s take FineReport as an example, which is a professional business reporting software that has helped more than 11000+ companies achieve report automation and boost their business.

Step 1 Extract the Data in the Automated Reporting

For most companies, there is hardly a complete system to support the establishment of the automated reporting platform. The reports can only be summarized and printed in Excel. How difficult it will be for the reporting staff to extract the data? 

The first key point is that FineReport is directly connected to the database. In detail, the data from the database can be centralized in the FineReport and can be updated in real time according to the fields.

If you want to make a report, you can directly extract the data from the database. In the same way, you can also integrate it into the OA and ERP system to pick up data and make reports at any time.

Step 2 Achieve Automatic Report Generation

With FineReport, you can save the templates in the platform, and the software will call the templates directly when you need to make reports.

It is easy to set up the templates. The only key here is parameter filtering,

By adding parameters to the time field, such as those that need to be filtered in daily, weekly and monthly reports. Then add the filter conditions to the corresponding data grid to create a settled report template, for example:

Besides, when we make regular reports, a lot of data and project progress are inevitably involved. At this time, it is difficult to directly reflect the situation by simple and boring data numbers.

Instead, you can use the dashboard and progress bar of FineReport to reflect the health of the project progress. 

Want to know the best part?

If you are still used to Excel, you can directly import the Excel sheets to the FineReport. That means you can automate the Excel reports without Python!

Step 3 Schedule Your Automated Reports 

FineReport provides a reporting portal with a powerful timing scheduled function that allows users to quickly and easily set up daily, monthly, quarterly, and annual reports, and other tasks without additional work.

After the scheduled tasks are set, the server will automatically complete the set tasks at the appointed time, and generate the required files.

The generated reports are notified to different objects in various ways such as email, message, and so on.

Besides, FineReport can automatically upload scheduled task files to the specified FTP server to prevent unexpected loss. 

3. Manual Vs. Automated Reporting

First, the most distinct automated reporting benefit is to save you time. Creating daily reports, weekly reports, or monthly reports manually is of the past. You can set up automated reports that will be sent to whoever you want and will always be up to date, which frees up your time to analyze the data or to communicate with the team which only humans can do. 

Second, auto-reporting ensures output without human error. Human work often requires double checks, but automation can be accurate since the software takes steps as settings: extract the data, generate the reports, and then send it.

Third, once automated, anyone can create reports. In other words, there is no need for a dedicated system, which can improve efficiency. As a result, the work of existing staff is reduced, and operation and management by a small number of people are stable.

That’s not all…..

IT departments can set automated reports and scheduled emails to email reports to the responsible person for them to track metrics, especially for middle-level managers.

4. Business Intelligence vs. Automated Reporting

The initial goal of automated reporting is to bring users relevant and useful information on time. On the other hand, business intelligence, short for BI, is about driving more efficient business decision-making and proactive analysis. Automate reporting provides timely data and BI helps organizations transform data into valuable insights.

5. Summary of Automated Reporting

Save time is to save money. Automatic reporting can lay a solid foundation for the company’s data-based operations. Previous surveys have shown that automation can easily eliminate manual work to improve work efficiency, which is widely recognized by company users.

To realize your reporting automation, the only you need is automated reporting software such as FineReport. Here to download FineReport for a trial. The personal version is free.

It’s free to make an appointment for a live demo with product experts from FineReport and work together to discover your needs and see how FineReport can help you and your organization transform data into value.

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