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Boost Your Productivity Levels With Automated Reporting System & Tools

Automated reporting by datapine

Data, information, and insights are all around us. To exceed your potential and stand out in an increasingly competitive market, there is always a new business plan to make, a new strategy to develop, and a new report to generate - and they all take time. Since massive amounts of information are generated by every second, businesses are always on the lookout for the best possible online data analysis tools - innovations that will ultimately make their processes easier, faster, and more effective.

Productivity has become the epitome of successful professional processes. While every manager seeks how to increase productivity and decrease costs, some invaluable processes can push toward sustainable development - fortunately, automated reporting and systems are the way forward.

That said, in this post, we will explain what an automated report is and its benefits, the ins and outs of the process, and finish with examples from the real business world. 

After reading this article, you will be equipped to create your own autonomous practice, understand the fundamentals of report automation, and enhance your analytical capabilities with the help of modern online reporting software.

Let's get started.

What Is An Automated Report?

An automated report is a management tool used by professionals to create and share organizational reports at a specific interval without having to update the information each time. These updates are usually made in real time with the help of smart reporting tools.

Automated report example: marketing performance dashboard

These reports completely eliminate traditional means of communicating data since they rely on business reporting software that uses cutting-edge BI, technology, and smart features such as interactivity, a drag-and-drop interface, and predictive analytics, among others. These reports have the power to store all your insights and generate beautiful dashboards that can tell your data narrative in a simple, visual way. 

The technology behind these insights will enable triggers so that you don't have to manually check if an unexpected organizational event occurs or export multiple spreadsheets to generate one single file.

Benefits Of An Automated Reporting System

Now that we’re up to speed with the concept of smart reporting, let’s look at the benefits.

Report automation will improve your business at its core, empowering you to develop strategies and initiatives that are better than your competitors. To put this into perspective, here’s a rundown of the main benefits for your company.

  • Time & cost savings: If you automate reports, you will save colossal amounts of time and money on manually tracking, updating, and adding key information to the mix. Naturally, time and money are correlated, so by automating reports, you will reap the rewards of valuable data-driven insights while empowering your team to place their efforts into more creative or strategic activities. In addition, an automated reporting system is designed to provide accurate, dynamic, and highly visual insights that will bestow your organization with greater intelligence. In turn, this will improve your decision-making while giving you the insight to streamline any inefficiencies in your processes and, ultimately, save you more money while generating more profit.
  • Accessibility, transparency & productivity: By serving up autonomous insights from one central location, automatic reports will give everyone in the organization the tools to perform better in their individual roles while benefiting from shared visualizations that are robust, reliable, and accurate. As modern automated reporting tools are easy to use and understand, everyone will find them accessible. As they will ensure all of your essential insights are up to date, it’s possible to use autonomous reports to support discussions in collaborative brainstorming sessions or team meetings, leading to increased creative output. The result? A more transparent, more collaborative environment that will keep your teams connected with each other, leading to increased productivity across the board, and a business built for sustainable growth.
  • Real-time decision-making: When using manual reporting tools or processes, it’s easy to get bogged down. In addition to this, more cumbersome reporting processes return data that is harder to understand and often inaccurate. With automated reports, you will gain access to accurate data presented in the form of visual KPI metrics - information that benefits real-time decision-making. In essence, this style of reporting provides clarity. It is simple to set up and serves up responsive data that users can leverage with a simple glance. If you see an issue emerging, you will be able to consult your t and make an informed, accurate decision that will save you time, money, or an organizational headache.
  • Growth & development: The above elements, coupled with the fact that you can access report automation tools 24/7 from multiple devices, meaning that by embracing this innovative branch of data analytics, you will set your company up for ongoing growth and development. With the help of an interactive digital dashboard, you can respond to constant change with confidence while maintaining a level of innovation that will give you an all-important edge on the competition at all times. This is an asset that’s invaluable in an ever-evolving digital landscape.
  • Reduce the risk of human error: Another key benefit of automating reports is the fact that it leaves less room for human error. A small analytical or administrative error can cost your company time and money. But by using reports automation technology, you will drive down the necessity for laborious manual data entry, connecting with insights that are digestible, accurate, and reliable in equal measures.
  • Improve compliance: When dashboards are generated automatically, and it is possible to ensure delivery at the right time and location, compliance becomes more accessible and routine. In our data-driven age, informational compliance is critical to ensure your organization remains credible, legal, and trustworthy. Automated reporting will ensure you stay on the right side of the red tape at all times.

Your Chance: Want to test modern reporting automation software?
Explore our 14-day free trial & automate your processes with datapine!

Report Automation Tips, Tricks & Tools

Report automation top 10 tips, tricks, and tools

Did you know? 67% of business decision-makers believe implementing digital or software solutions is vital to remain competitive.

The potential of automation certainly has a positive impact on productivity levels since the entire workforce can focus on more human-centric tasks while embarking on deeper discussions surrounding the meaning of the data, migrating away from tedious tasks and manual calculations in the process. But how does this look in practice?

To make sure you make the most out of autonomous reporting before you start, answer these critical questions and consider these tips or tricks.

1.  What are my reporting needs?

First of all, it’s important to consider your specific informational needs. Depending on what you believe will benefit from increased intelligence or efficiency (you might feel that you want to improve your customer service communications without hindering productivity, for instance), you can make informed decisions on the types of features, dashboards, and visualizations that will best suit your organization. At this point, it’s also worth considering who will be working with your automation reports and the kind of insights into functionality they will need to succeed.

 Work through your specific needs with care and you will form solid foundations for your next automatic reporting question…

2. What kind of KPIs do I need to integrate?

KPIs are the center of each tool and you need to communicate them clearly and on point. Choosing the most important ones to generate a comprehensive narrative should be your first step in automating reports. By creating visuals with the help of a dashboard designer, you can have all your KPIs on a single screen, ready to explore by utilizing powerful interactive features.

3. At what frequency do I need to send my reports?

This question will help you determine whether your insights will focus on an operational level or strategic. Operational reporting has its foundations over shorter periods, often daily or weekly, and concentrates on lower-level KPIs. Strategic, on the other hand, look at metrics that need to be monitored over a longer period of time to be able to derive the best possible conclusion.

You can explore our guide on financial reports, where we analyzed various types of reports and provided examples.

4. What type of report would suit my recipients the best?

As mentioned, AI-driven reports have numerous features that should make your working life easier. When it comes to developing a proper autonomous reporting system, you should look for these invaluable options to get the better out of your efforts:

  • Standard and customized reports: No matter the number of recipients, standard and customized reports are simply sent to designated email addresses on a defined schedule. Their content and filters can be customized so you have complete control over the information you want to share.
  • Live dashboards and/or secure viewer area: If you want to share or send your whole dashboard, a simple URL is all you need. Additionally, you can assign a viewer area where the user can access the dashboard and use filters that are assigned by you, but they can't edit or rearrange the dashboard themselves.
  • Embedding the dashboard: By taking a step further, your dashboards can be embedded into your own application or website, for example, you can take over the complete product and present it to your clients as your own. By using embedded BI tools like datapine, you get all the benefits of the software without having to invest tons of money and time in creating your own. 
  • Printing bounds: Printing, although a more traditional way of presenting data, can sometimes prove to be useful, especially for an in-person meeting. You can simply set a reminder for printing your dashboards, and all the updated metrics will be there, in a functional PDF or PNG format.

5. Define your core aims & goals

While this sounds glaringly obvious, you’d be amazed at how many people overlook this golden rule. Now, we’ve already outlined the importance of setting your KPIs. What we mean here is: to decide on the specific departments, processes, or functions you feel could benefit from streamlining and define your core data automation goals within those parameters.

Do you want to make paid advertising efforts more efficient? Are you looking for a better, more effective way of displaying your team’s performance metrics? Is saving time sifting through your recruitment insights a top priority? If you set specific goals, you will streamline your data analytics strategy in the right areas. As a result, your autonomous insights will provide responsive, intelligent insights related to the departmental functions that matter most. For example, your sales team can constantly access your social media reports and see how many leads you are getting from a certain campaign. 

6. Provide access & education

When it comes to automatic reporting, the more people can benefit, the better. Rather than giving sole access to a selected few, you should run workshops to enlighten everyone in the company on the virtues of automated data reporting.

By giving everyone in your organization some form of access to your tools and templates and teaching them how to use them to their advantage, you will create a data-driven reputation that will increase productivity and engagement across the board. This also extends to partners and clients: by providing access to your automated reports, you will empower them to check their performance by working with responsive, reliable live data.

7. Work with advanced technologies

Automated reporting comes with a wealth of intuitive technologies that make the curation, collection, visualization, and analytical processes simpler, swifter, and more accurate.

Driven by artificial intelligence (AI), many automated reporting systems features deliver dynamic informational visualizations and deep-dive insights with minimal human intervention. Using these autonomous technologies to your advantage will streamline your operations while making sure you never miss vital trends, patterns, or information.

Data alerts are a prime example of AI-based report-style functions. Powered by neural network and machine learning technologies, intelligent data alerts notify you of critical organizational milestones (when a benchmark is met or a certain pattern emerges that needs immediate attention, for instance) based on your specific goals and needs. A powerful function that will boost your business intelligence (BI) capabilities across the board while minimizing the amount of manual work invested in constantly monitoring how the data fluctuates. 

8. Keep refining & measuring

Automate reports are incredibly powerful and valuable. But that doesn’t mean you can run a report and expect it to deliver value indefinitely.

To enjoy a healthy return on investment (ROI) from your intelligent reports, you should check in with them periodically to ensure that the data you’re working with is still relevant. If your company evolves or the industry around you changes, you might need to redefine your goals slightly and make refinements to your visualizations. Doing so will ensure you keep on reaping those boosting rewards.

9. Choose the best tool for your needs 

No matter the industry, the process of data gathering is tedious and time-consuming. Imagine how much time is reduced by simply introducing automated report generation across departments. To be able to make the most out of it, you should choose report automation tools wisely according to your specific needs.

While some business intelligence tools include automated reporting features as well as interactive dashboards, others such as datapine, offer, in addition, a number of advanced ways to perform quality analysis such as predictive analytics, and data connectors to see all your information in one place, and data alerts that let you know when anything unconventional happened in your data. Like this, when choosing your automatic reporting tools you should always take into consideration the extra potential you can extract from them. 

10. Use modern automated reporting tools

Working with modern automated reporting tools is the way forward. As we told you, BI solutions such as datapine, offer the option of creating standard or customized platforms while consolidating your most valuable data in one dynamic and accessible dashboard. Watch our video overview to see our automated reporting tool in action: 

To fully understand how report automation software benefits the operational and strategic initiatives of companies, no matter how big they are, we have prepared industry real-world examples that we will explore in more detail and ensure you get a visual understanding of smart reporting in practice.

Automated Reporting System in Business Scenarios

To put the power of automated reporting into perspective, we’re going to look at 15 dashboards based on common organizational functions, departments, and situations.

1. Automated reporting in the manufacturing industry

The manufacturing industry needs continuous automation throughout processes, and each part of the company needs to work flawlessly in order to avoid potential internal issues and cost increments. That's why an agile BI dashboard such as the one below can help in the process.

An automated report for the manufacturing industry, displaying main manufacturing KPIs to keep the pulse of your factory

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This dashboard aims to report on the production status of a manufacturing company. Automation, in this case, is crucial. When there are numerous touchpoints to control, analyze and react to, if necessary, the software will prove to be priceless. By letting the dashboard automatically monitor and report if there are any issues, companies can improve their efficiency - exponentially. Manufacturing KPIs such as the production volume, the number of active machines, and the top 5 machines by production volume will certainly give you a clear overview of the status of your equipment.

You don't have to manually update any data, autonomous reports will provide the full scope of your production processes and deliver information in a timely manner.

2. Automated reports in marketing

Marketing is one of the functions that require regular and updated reports, no matter if it's daily, weekly, or monthly data in question. To be able to launch and optimize the best possible campaign, a visual marketing report can let you focus on the data at hand, excluding the time needed to export spreadsheets and write a completely new document. In marketing, this notion is precious.

An automated reporting system implemented in a marketing use case for managing online campaigns with the help of KPIs such as total number of impressions, clicks, acquisitions, costs, etc.

**click to enlarge**

Automated marketing reporting can help drill down into the performance of paid promotional efforts. By sending this report weekly or monthly, without the need to manually update each piece of content, your marketing department will save countless hours in report creation. Additionally, if you manage multiple client accounts in an agency, then this report can also be embedded, and white-labeled as a client reporting dashboard, so you can use it as your own brand and adjust it so that it fits your client's needs.

3. Automation in logistics & transportation

In a thriving digital economy where it’s possible to connect with customers or clients wherever they are in the world, you need to ensure your transportation logistics are fully optimized across every key touchpoint.

An automated report example showing a Logistics Transportation Dashboard visualizing essential KPIs when it comes to delivery

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Designed to offer a detailed snapshot of essential logistics metrics, including loading & weight as well as delivery times, destination, and status, our smart transportation dashboard will help you streamline your strategy with minimal friction. Here, you can pinpoint issues or areas that need improvement while continually benchmarking your activities for ongoing fluency, consistency, and growth.

4. Automation in sales & revenue growth

Where would your company be without a regular flow of sales? To maximize your sales efforts and campaigns while maintaining consistently high productivity levels, you need the right insights - and our sales dashboard delivers.

Report automation tool: monthly sales report template focused on high-level metrics such as revenue, profits, costs, incremental sales, accumulated revenue, up/cross-sell rates, etc.

**click to enlarge**

Boasting a balanced mix of KPI-based sales graph types, charts, and visualizations, this savvy tool offers deep-dive information based on your cross-selling or upselling activities, incremental sales according to a campaign, revenue per sales rep, and more.

This melting pot of deep-dive insight will help you refine your messaging, strategies, and lead-generation campaigns for constant growth and success while driving down unnecessary costs - an essential tool for every modern business. 

Your Chance: Want to test modern reporting automation software?
Explore our 14-day free trial & automate your processes with datapine!

5. Automated procurement & quality control

How you procure your goods, services, and assets will have a huge impact on your company’s overall growth as well as its bottom line.

Reporting automation in procurement industry. Dashboard displaying metrics to track quality control

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Our procurement dashboard is a nerve center of information, serving up KPI-centric insights including vendor rejection rates & costs, supplier quality rating, emergency purchase ratio, purchases in time & budget, and spending under management.

By accessing this stream of information frequently, you can assess the value of your existing suppliers while identifying any potential kinks in your procurement process. By doing so, you will become more financially efficient and ensure there are no roadblocks or bottlenecks in your procurement chain, making your organization healthier in the process.

6. Automating financial management and strategy

Automating reports for financial efficiency is essential, as they will help keep your business secure, fluent, scalable, and attractive to potential investors.

An automation report example for financial performance

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This dynamic financial dashboard is equipped with a host of valuable KPIs that provide a panoramic insight into all key financial areas of the business. With accurate insights based on cash conversion cycles, working capital, budget variance, and vendor payment error rate, delivered in a digestible, autonomous fashion, here you have all of the insights you need to keep your company’s monetary management strategy as healthy as possible.

With key past, predictive, and in-the-moment metrics all on the same page, here, you can also nip any emerging issues in the bud while formulating initiatives that will ultimately reduce unnecessary costs and contribute to boosting your bottom line.

7. Automation in customer service reporting

In today’s ultra-connected digital age, customer service and experience are the key brand differentiators across industries. If you improve your customer support, care, and communications, you will accelerate the growth of your organization.

Customer service automated report example tracking team performance in time

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The problem is, with so many queries to resolve and an ever-increasing number of channels to consider, taking an analytical approach to your consumer-facing strategy can seem like an uphill struggle. But by working with reporting automation, you can get ahead of the pack.

Our autonomous service team platform is equipped with a balanced mix of highly-visual customer service KPIs that offer deep-dive insights into first-call resolutions, response times, top-performing agents, and issue numbers. This melting pot of information will give you everything you need to improve your decision-making while developing targeted initiatives to improve your accuracy, efficiency, and customer service output.

8. Automation in personnel and workforce management

Businesses that can harness the full power of their HR and workforce-centric analytics stand to outperform their direct competitors in almost every key area.

An automated report example tracking relevant human resources metrics to ensure efficient talent management

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Our insightful human resources analytics tool offers a cohesive cross-section of ‘glanceable’ visualizations designed for HR operatives and decision-makers to understand key behaviors, demographics, and patterns concerning their company’s internal talent.

Here, you can explore existing gender ratios, and examine trends in first-year resignations, notices according to age range, and numbers of part-time and full-time employees. Armed with this information, you can create targeted strategies to improve engagement while offering training and mentorship to the right people at the right time, earning a healthier ROI for your talent acquisition efforts.

9. Automation in hospital performance and operations

When it comes to medical institutions, the quality, speed, and accuracy of your analytical initiatives can mean the difference between life and death.

Hospital metrics displayed on an automated report to monitor the performance of the facility

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Offering a dynamic insight into fiscal aspects of healthcare as well as logistical information, our hospital performance dashboard will help you achieve optimum financial efficiency while improving your level of patient management.

By working with this interactive healthcare dashboard, you can monitor patient-to-nurse ratios, uncover hospital infection trends, understand admission rates, and examine treatment costs all in one accessible location. A game-changer for highly-pressured medical institutions everywhere.

10. Google Analytics automate reporting

Google Analytics is a vital tool for any modern business looking to optimize your various web and landing pages for specific audience segments.

This marketing automated report provides the perfect overview of your KPIs, and enables you to discover early-on if you are on track to meet your targets

**click to enlarge**

To gain a competitive edge and make your Google Analytics operations all the more impactful, our dedicated autonomous tool digs deeper into your most vital insights, delivering a wealth of actionable website KPIs automatically.

Here, you can gain additional context into your goal conversion rates, bounce rates, various visitors, and web sessions with ease, uncovering insights that you may have previously missed from the platform. An effective way to streamline your online strategy and deliver the assets your target consumers want.

11. Reporting automation in IT

As one of the most pressed departments in any modern business, working with automated reporting tools to streamline your IT operations is essential to sustainable success. 

IT automated reports: project management overview

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This dynamic IT dashboard is interactive, engaging, and highly visual, providing a panoramic view of your core technical operations. With an automated overview of your current workload, specific project deadlines (including the staff members responsible for delivery), project budgets, and overdue tasks in one cohesive report, you can ensure the successful delivery of even the most complex projects with pinpoint precision.

This dashboard curates and presents a wealth of invaluable IT management data to help spot any inefficiencies while serving up responsive insights that will improve communication as well as decision-making under pressure. If you’re looking to improve your IT department’s output while improving financial efficiency, this automated reporting software will deliver.

12. Customer service automated report

Today’s consumers value exceptional customer experience (CX) and service, sometimes above price and product. Regardless of your niche or sector, investing in your consumer-facing processes and strategies should be a top priority.

Automated reporting example tracking customer service quality for different channels

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This automated client reporting tool will empower you to manage your customer service communications across a multitude of channels including phone, live chat, email, and social media. Armed with the ability to track dynamic data visualizations as they unfold, it’s possible to drill down into resolution times across specific periods while staying on top of service tickets across every key consumer-facing touchpoint.

The highly-intuitive nature of this automated reporting system makes it easy to identify service trends and fluctuations to understand which factors are having the biggest impact. As a result, you will make better customer service decisions while decreasing resolution times, improving responsivity rates, and improving your brand reputation across the board.

13. Report automation in social media

By automating your social media reporting efforts, you can significantly improve your chances of earning conversions, capturing valuable leads, and boosting brand awareness by reaching out to the right segments of your audience when they’re most likely to engage. 

Social media engagement automated report example

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This visually-balanced and incredibly responsive social media automated reporting dashboard is designed to provide a detailed snapshot of your consumers’ key demographics as well as key content engagement metrics across channels. Here you can drill down into new followers, comments per post, content shares, and clicks within specific periods. It’s also possible to map out your ratios of gained to lost followers throughout the year to examine where your strategy and content are working and where it’s falling short.

This insightful digital media dashboard will give you the intelligence required to craft content that offers direct value to particular segments of your audience while inspiring them to take a desired action such as visiting a landing page, reading an article, watching a promotional video, buying a product, or signing up to a newsletter.

14. Report automating in the FMCG industry

Automated dashboard reporting plays a pivotal role in the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector—and for good reason. Without a slick and sustainable strategy to store, handle, and shift fast-moving goods down the supply chain, you could end up burning a monumental hole in your business budget while putting a serious dent in your brand reputation.

Automated report template for the FMCG industry

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This FMCG-based automated data reporting dashboard serves up a balanced mix of dynamic visual data to present up-to-date information on stock levels, inventory turnover lengths, and average selling periods according to different consumer categories.

The KPIs contained within this FMCG dashboard also track timely delivery trends as well as quantities of goods sold within their freshness date. Working with these autonomous metrics will uncover a wealth of insight based on your FMCG handling processes from end to end. By uncovering sales, turnover, and fulfillment patterns, it’s possible to reduce friction in the supply chain while making choices that ensure your stock offers the best possible return on investment throughout the year.

15. Reporting automation for energy management

Due to recent surges in unit costs as well as pressing environmental concerns, managing your energy consumption effectively as a business is paramount. 

Energy management automated report with high level KPIs

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To manage your energy across multiple sites, having a sustainable automated reporting process in place should be something on your organizational to-do list. This engaging energy dashboard features visualizations that will allow you to compare your company’s energy consumption to benchmarks in other industries. Here you can also view your overall energy consumption as well as associated costs at a quick glance while breaking down your sources and production outgoings with ease.

By interacting with this cohesive mix of data regularly, you can take targeted measures to reduce certain types of energy consumption and make better choices concerning the power sources you use. In turn, this will enhance your organization’s financial efficiency exponentially while improving your brand reputation.

Your Chance: Want to test modern reporting automation software?
Explore our 14-day free trial & automate your processes with datapine!

Types Of Automated Reporting Tools

Now that you’ve explored ten real-world examples, let’s cement our knowledge by looking at the four types of autonomous tools available in today’s data-driven landscape.

1. Code-based tools

In terms of automated reporting generation, code-based tools are useful as they offer complete control over the reporting system, allowing you to customize certain aspects based on specific requirements or preferences.

The primary drawback of code-based tools is that they take a great deal of time to develop, test, and debug, which can drain your time as well as your budget. Additionally, they require advanced technical knowledge that can present an issue for average business users that want to benefit from them. 

2. Low-code or no-code tools

Low-code or no-code tools are simple to master and fairly quick to implement. These tools mainly operate through drag-and-drop functionality while pulling information from various sources, including social media, email, and spreadsheets.

While low-code or no-code tools can prove effective and require little to no programming skills to use, they are rigid, limited in scope, and difficult to customize.

3. BI tools

BI tools are intuitive and provide easy access to a wealth of metrics related to every operational aspect of the organization. Using BI tools for automating purposes facilitates aggregation, analysis, and visualization of business insights within the confines of interactive dashboard-style tools.

Modern BI tools such as datapine provide a fully customizable analytical experience, pulling from multiple sources to deliver a range of positive business outcomes. These tools require little thought and training to be successfully implemented, but the investment is undoubtedly worthwhile. Their self-service focus allows an average user to easily get acquainted with the power of analytics.

4. Dashboard tools

Modern dashboard tools are closely related to BI platforms and offer a wealth of dynamic autonomous functionality that ultimately brings data to life. Typically, these types of tools are categorized into three main areas: strategic, operational, and analytical. By offering access to highly-visual and interactive KPIs, these dynamic offerings give users access to a cohesive mix of past, predictive, and real-time insights. Several BI dashboard tools out there offer automated dashboard generation with just a few clicks, making the process intuitive and efficient. 

The right BI-centric tools are largely customizable, accessible, fairly simple to master, and fully integrable.

Challenges of Automated Reporting

“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.” - Bill Gates

Without a doubt, automated reporting offers a wealth of business-boosting benefits to those willing to embrace it—but, it also comes with its share of challenges. By understanding the potential roadblocks, you can overcome any pitfalls while navigating your way to success. Let’s look at the biggest challenges of report automation.

Data Security

First of all, when working with any software, the risks of a data breach increase.

With extensive levels of potentially sensitive data running through automated tools and reporting systems, it’s possible for sensitive information to be leaked or fall short of compliance regulations like GDPR. To avoid such issues, adding a robust security protocol to your automated reporting strategy is essential. 

Data Accuracy

Another potential pitfall is poor data accuracy. If you work with low-quality or redundant data, your automated monthly reports will essentially become redundant or worse, misleading, resulting in poor decision-making and wasted resources. By working collaboratively to curate and consolidate data from reliable sources, you will reap the kind of automated reporting benefits that will drive your business forward.

Design

Poor report or dashboard designs can make your reporting efforts confusing or create user friction. The aim of reporting automation is to make your data as accessible as possible and to do so, you have to develop designs that are clean, and minimal, and present all of your KPIs in a way that everyone in the business can understand.

Employee adoption

Last but certainly not least, a lack of employee adoption can put a spanner in the works. If your staff is skeptical or reluctant to use your automation reporting software, achieving your goals will become an uphill struggle. Hosting group workshops and providing adequate training will help you tackle this issue and work towards a progressive data-driven culture.

The Role Of Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence in Report Automation

As we move to an increasingly autonomous future, AI and machine learning (ML) technologies are beginning to play a pivotal role in report automation.

These increasingly prevalent technologies are responsible for not only cleansing colossal sets of data and arranging them into relevant functions or categories—AI and ML technologies can also autonomously spot particular trends or patterns in data, refining their efforts with every interaction.

In doing so, ML and AI systems can serve up dynamic visualizations that evolve with continual data fluctuations while triggering alerts based on certain trends, patterns, and parameters. Ultimately, AI and ML innovations will make businesses across sectors more data responsive in the not-so-distant future—making business intelligence a core part of every successful business strategy. 

Robotic processes like AI and ML essentially facilitate report automation, with a self-improving ecosystem that scales and evolves with the business itself. Without ML and AI-driving reporting systems, it’s unlikely that any data strategy will ever reach its full potential. The likes of Netflix, Spotify, and Amazon use autonomous technologies to segment and understand their audiences with pinpoint efficiency and create highly-personalized user experiences. These visionary brands rely on smart automated reporting to scale, grow, and remain ahead of the curve—and to compete, a growing number of businesses will adopt AI and ML in the coming years.

Your Chance: Want to test modern reporting automation software?
Explore our 14-day free trial & automate your processes with datapine!

Automated Reporting Conclusions

When you’re considering how to automate reports, it pays to understand how analytics work in principle   - and hopefully, that’s what we’ve achieved here.

Businesses work best when embracing the power of intelligent reporting. By embracing the power of autonomous reporting software, you will boost your productivity significantly while gaining the ability to focus your efforts on driving the company forward. We are living in a bold new tech-centric age, and those that get on board will win long-term.

In a time where digital transformation is on the rise and an increasing number of businesses are entering the analytical arena, making your business’s most precious insights as efficient, accurate, and informational as possible is critical. No exceptions, no compromises.

We’ve examined a wealth of real-world business scenarios from sales and marketing to automated financial reporting and FMCG and one thing is clear: report automation is the most effective means of driving maximum growth, efficiency, and value from your analytical efforts.

On our journey, we’ve also explored an official automated reports definition, looked at a definitive roadmap as well as real-world examples to create such reports, and explained how reports automation can lead to sustainable growth. There is no denying it: automated report software will ensure your business thrives. You will gain an edge over the competition.

Are you ready to improve your processes with the power of autonomous analytics? Try datapine for a 14-day trial to maximize your analytical initiatives today. We look forward to working with you.