Automated Reporting: A Comprehensive Guide

Flying blind doesn’t cut it when it comes to business intelligence. A 2019 HubSpot travel and expense (T&E) management report said over a quarter of the companies polled didn’t know if the submitted expenses complied with T&E policy!

Data transparency issues can plague enterprises as they struggle to manage large data volumes. It’s why enterprise reporting can seem daunting, but automation can help.

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In this article, we discuss automated reporting, its benefits, case studies and buying considerations.

Article Roadmap

• What Is Automated Reporting?
• Pain Points
• Benefits
• Who Uses It
• Case Studies
• Features To Consider
• Pricing Considerations
• Next Steps

The abovementioned HubSpot survey revealed that 43% of companies depend on manual processes, including pen and paper, to manage travel and expense costs.

Manual processes leave a lot to be desired. The report said only 27% of the surveyed companies had a system to automatically flag unauthorized expenses, leaving them open to fraud.

Automation helps businesses better manage their data using repeatable workflows. Nothing falls through the cracks.

What Is Automated Reporting?

Automated reporting is the process of generating and sharing business reports by using pre-configured data integration, aggregation and analysis workflows. Automation is a significant disruptor in programmable systems.

Automated reporting tools are software programs that let you configure those workflows. Many automated reporting tools serve domain verticals like CRM, sales management, healthcare and manufacturing.

Additionally, they serve finance, marketing automation and internal operations. These platforms need little coding knowledge and IT skills like other modern software.

Managing Big Data

Automation helps you tackle another bear — big data integration and reporting. Trawling through large, complex volumes to get what you seek is challenging.

Once automated data management rules are in place, you’re free from collecting and organizing information. Instead, you can focus on deriving business intelligence for decision-making.

We’ve come a long way from configuring Excel macros to do our work for us. Building macros needs Visual Basic programming skills and patience, both in short stock in this age of big data and changing KPIs.

Excel is good at calculations but lags behind modern reporting and BI tools with more comprehensive connectivity, integrations and robust workflow wizards. These features make them better Excel alternatives.

How It Works

A reporting workflow visually represents the steps for creating reports in an organization. It includes the various stages of the reporting process, including data collection, analysis, visualization and distribution.

Modern software gives you handy workflow wizards to create and record the report-building steps. You can run them as needed and duplicate and modify them to build different reports.

Automation code includes triggers that initiate the workflow when certain conditions are achieved. We see it every day — an action triggers a response.
A trigger can be event-based, like a scheduled time or selection on the interface.

Sourcing a bank statement from your mobile or net banking service is automated reporting on demand. Clicking the “Download Report” button acts as the event that initiates a response — the application code downloads the report to your device.

What Is RPA?

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is cutting-edge technology for building specialized code — bots — to perform routine tasks automatically. Among other tasks, RPA bots take routine reporting activities off your hands, reducing the time spent on insight generation.

Assigning month-end reporting to bots saves considerable cost, removes errors and boosts efficiency.

Automation is a game changer, yet complacency can be a blocker. Per the report mentioned above, 44% of companies that didn’t intend to invest in a dedicated expense management solution said, “Our current processes work well enough.”

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Pain Points

Maintaining the fast pace of big data reporting using manual systems is painful. Modern business environments are dynamic and need quick turnarounds.

Let’s say it takes five people five to eight business days to create month-end reports. At $25 per hour on average, that’s $8,000 spent on reporting, a task that takes minutes with an automated platform.

A lack of understanding about the benefits, resistance to change and the cost of implementation can deter businesses from adopting these solutions.
Here’s how you may lose out.

• Loss of revenue from delayed projects, and staffing and system costs can impact your bottom line. It can hurt business as clients and employees may lose confidence in data.
• Manual reporting has ill-defined data quality standards, which may result in erroneous and inconsistent reports. Rectifying the mistakes costs more money.
• Manual insight generation can be limiting — you can’t generate various reports or include many data types. As a result, you risk poor visibility into business metrics.
• Remote job sites generate information that can be difficult to report if not incorporated in time. Add to it the time spent preparing the reports, and you risk communication delays and lost opportunities.
• Manual reporting processes, alerts and updates are hard to track, making it challenging to maintain accurate records.
• They can be difficult to scale with large volumes of data as the business grows.

Automation can work for your reporting processes. How?

Primary Benefits

Per the 2019 survey, adopting automation turned it around for 57% of businesses polled. They reported a positive ROI in one year or less.

Whereas reporting presents metrics, business intelligence takes it further with data and business analytics. These disciplines provide crucial decision support along with predictive analytics.

Many BI and analytics tools have automated reporting capabilities and vice versa. Ready business insight directly impacts operations, customer satisfaction and business spending.

• Save time and money by delegating routine reporting tasks to software. Focus on growing your business and upskilling your teams. Many modern reporting systems are cloud-based and easily scalable.
• Establish your brand by improving customer service with deep insight into buyers’ needs. Enhance your offerings by tuning into user sentiment with accurate market data.
• Take advantage of opportunities by automatically highlighting market trends in long, exhaustive reports.
• Increase data accuracy by removing the need for manual data entry. Establish data standards and enforce compliance to retain client trust.
• Get custom reports with your choice of visualizations and tailor-made dashboards. Share only the relevant information with users and let them explore and manipulate the data without affecting underlying databases.
• Improve decision support by feeding timely information to downstream systems. Report automation mitigates pressure on employees to deliver insight on time.
• Boost operational efficiency with one-click visibility into business performance. Identify improvement areas and amplify successes to keep employees motivated.

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Who Uses It

The automation code is customizable and suitable for any domain once tweaked. Finance, marketing, transportation logistics, retail and healthcare companies incorporate report automation software into their tech stack.

• Financial Management and Strategy: Automated processes provide comprehensive data on working capital, budget variance, income and cash flow. Including data from various sources helps manage risk better.
• Marketing: Designing effective marketing campaigns involves listening to buyer sentiment. Automated reporting systems include CRMs, POS and eCommerce systems.
• Logistics and Transportation: Automation platforms incorporate GPS location data, shipment weight, and destination and delivery information into reports.
• Customer Service: Automated reports on received calls, response times, and unresolved issues help you move quickly to address them. Besides, this information serves agent training.
• Sales and Revenue: It’s a dynamic domain with metrics fluctuating by the minute, so the latest sales and inventory levels and point-of-sale (POS) data are business-critical. Automation provides near-real-time information when needed.
• Workforce Management: Delegate periodic reporting on performance metrics and productivity patterns to automated systems. Stay on top of employee turnover trends with timely insight and modify training programs accordingly.
• Procurement: On-demand views of compliance rate, supplier defect rate and availability tell you if a vendor is reliable. Monitoring the purchase order cycle time helps identify blockers and inconsistencies.
• Healthcare: Medical services organizations use automation for gathering patient data and verifying treatment protocols, but that’s not all. Timely cost, revenue and regulatory compliance reports make life easier for administrators.
• Manufacturing: On-demand equipment monitoring and output tracking are business-critical to keep systems running. Automatically generated status reports keep you informed about your production line.

Case Studies

Garmin: Expense Reporting Automation

Garmin is a GPS technology leader specializing in wearable tech and serves the automobile, marine, aviation, outdoor and fitness industries. With more than 11,500 employees globally, expense reporting is a challenge.

The company’s AP (accounts payable) team struggled with legacy spreadsheets and manual reporting workflows. Payment delays and tedious paperwork plagued employees as they waited for reimbursement on expenses incurred for company work.

With Certify, an expense report software, they did away with paper trails and manual data entry.

They could spot duplicate records in less time, and a locked approval process streamlined the review of submitted expenses. Automatic check clearing speeded up the payment process.

Deloitte: Monthly Management Reporting Automation

Deloitte has 12 offices in Brazil with over 5,500 professionals. The company provides monthly management reports to 190 firms in the country for decision support and growth planning.

Manual data entry into over 200 Microsoft Excel spreadsheets from multiple systems cost the company a significant sum. Add to that the cost of CFO review and they were leaking money. They took a closer look at their processes.

It took five analysts five to eight days every month to prepare the reports. Other routine tasks included collating accounts receivable and travel expense reports.

Deloitte integrated IBM’s AI-driven RPA solution with their ERP system to transfer data automatically into report templates. They set up RPA bots for monthly management, accounts receivable and travel expense reporting.

The results were impressive.

• The new system reduced the monthly management report prep time from 5-8 days to 1 hour.
• Generating a daily aging invoice report takes 15 minutes instead of one hour.
• Building a travel expense report takes 15 minutes.

Portland SEO Growth: Content Marketing Reporting

Marketing agencies need to put their best foot forward when impressing clients. Portland SEO Growth is a content marketing agency hiring military spouses. Their clients include WebMD, Autodesk and other Fortune 500 companies.

When Joey Randanzzo started the company, he knew they needed an automated tool from day one. They partnered with AgencyAnalytics to report on marketing metrics, freeing over 60 hours.

Automated white-label reporting provides the SEO metrics of clients and incorporates organic traffic data from Google Analytics and social media. The company saved $100,000 in billable hours each year.

PicMonkey: Subscription Management

PicMonkey is an online photo editor and graphic designer. Monitoring business health involves tracking the Active Subscriber Count (ASC) that varies with sign-ups, cancellations, pricing changes and account reactivations.

Gathering information was like playing catch-up and failing. The system was prone to errors, omissions and discrepancies. Staff had to pull data from Google BigQuery and aggregate it before copying it into a report.

PicMonkey partnered with Blast Analytics to create a company-wide strategic KPI dashboard. Advanced SQL scripting automated data ingestion. Defining KPIs and integrating the platform with Tableau helped automate ASC calculations.

Tracking the subscriber count helps PicMonkey improve lead acquisition by aligning its marketing campaigns.

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Features To Consider

Embedding keeps critical metrics front and center in your business systems. Which other capabilities make an excellent automated reporting platform?

• Excellent connectivity to internal and external systems, including geospatial platforms, is essential.
• Workflow wizards and templates allow for generating custom reports on demand.
• Data visualization with automatic recommendations for the best graphics speeds up data analysis.
• Interoperability with other CRM, ERP and eCommerce tools is essential.
• Ad hoc reports should be downloadable and shareable via web and email client servers.
• Collaborative views with commenting and tagging help teams engage with their data and conduct meaningful discussions.
• Security, governance and data privacy compliance create trust in your data. Administrators must have control over user access.
• Limited-row previews boost performance by saving processing power. It allows you to select the desired metrics before loading the complete view.

• In-app, email and mobile alerts and notifications about KPIs exceeding preset limits can help you avoid issues before they impact business.

If you’re on the hunt for a new solution, get our free, customizable requirements template to easily define your business needs so you can start your product search off on the right foot.

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Pricing Considerations

According to ScienceSoft, developing a BI tool with automated reporting can cost upward of $70,000. Subscription costs can be as low as $9.99 monthly per user for a Power BI Pro license, while Tableau Creator comes at $70 monthly per user.

Vendors offer different pricing models to cater to varied customer needs.

• Subscription-based pricing involves paying a recurring fee for a specified number of users, reports and a certain functionality level.
• A perpetual license model charges a one-time cost of owning the software and gives you more control over how you use it.
• A freemium model gives you a free basic version of the software, but opting for additional functionality will cost you. It’s a great way to try the product before committing to a subscription or perpetual license.
• Custom pricing depends on buyer preferences — the number of users, the volume of data processed and the level of support required.

The subscription-based model is the most popular mode of purchase, offering a lower upfront cost with ongoing support and updates from the vendor. But your specific needs will determine which model suits you the best.

Most modern tools are cloud-based, offering a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) version. They’re vendor-hosted though dependent on Internet services for availability and speed. But, their lightweight model with ease of use makes them popular.

Get detailed scorecards for the leading platforms with our comparison report.

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Next Steps

According to the statistics above, organizations are resistant to change and unaware of the benefits of adopting modern software. To succeed in business, you must take the leap of faith, trust the system and select a suitable automated reporting tool.

Ready to get started? We’re here to help. Contact our experienced Community Managers to walk you through the process.

What else would you like to know about automated reporting? Tell us in the comments below.