Less Time on the Tools, More on the Decisions

Five reasons you should boost your business with automated reporting.

Business moves fast. Gone are the days of a 40-hour work week. The average American worker barely has time to attend urgent meetings, hire that next employee, pick up the kids, and get home in time for family dinner. At the end of the day people are simply worn out and left with an empty tank, only to do it all again eight hours later.

Where does our time and energy go?

Our attention gets pulled in so many different directions. Whether it’s unnecessary meetings or menial tasks, so many distractions take away from the real work.

One of the biggest areas where our clients at AMEND experience this wasted time is in creating reports. No one wants to spend their time gathering data, formatting it in Excel, and manually creating reports and visualizations. Our clients experience the problems with this every day, and it pains me to see, because there’s a better way.

Automated reporting brings people relevant data without the users having to extract it themselves. This allows users to decide when they want reports, what information they’re looking for, etc. They can even be triggered by certain events or activity levels.

There are a lot of reasons why you should look into automated reporting for your business. One of our clients, a $150 million-dollar building materials company, has transformed their business through automated reporting. Here are five of the most important ways that it can help save you time and money:

1. Automated reporting helps you make decisions faster

Perhaps the biggest reason you should adopt automated reporting in your business today is its ability to enable your leaders. Decision-makers don’t want to worry about making mistakes while manually filling in spreadsheets. They want to focus on what really matters: making decisions that will help the business grow. Automated reporting cuts away the fat and gives insights into the health of the business, trends, and what’s coming next.

2. Automated reporting enables you to focus on the truly important work

Automated reporting allows you to shift your mental energy from copying and pasting to strategizing and deploying. Because you’re not worrying about getting a report out in time, you can worry about the things your business is doing well and where improvements are needed. Our building materials client was struggling to make sense of the metrics they were gathering; automated reporting allowed them to stop thinking about the data and start thinking about the work they needed to do.

3. Automated reporting gives you accurate data every time

Humans aren’t perfect. But even with something that seems impossible to mess up like copying and pasting numbers, hiccups still happen. Because automation mostly takes out the human element, there are usually zero mistakes. That’s one of the reasons why automated reporting is so valuable — you know that what you’re getting is correct.

4. Automated reporting is always up to date

One of the biggest inefficiencies with manually creating reports and sending them out is that the recipients don’t have the most up-to-date version of the report. If numbers change, a new event occurs, or anything else that would cause the reports to change, the reports update. The decision-makers who need the data don’t have the right figures to make assumptions. You can get a report daily, hourly, or whenever you need it! Each time it’ll have the latest and most accurate numbers. Our building materials client loves the fact that the days of wondering which report is the best to use are over!

5. Automated reporting saves time

As I mentioned before, creating reports can be a mindless task. Obviously no one wants to waste their time. Instead of manually entering data and creating a graph from it, automated reporting takes on this duty. Gone are the days of you popping in earphones and copying rows and columns for hours.

I believe in the power of automated reporting because I’ve seen the positive effects it can have on businesses (like the building materials company mentioned earlier) if done right. Plenty of our clients have been able to save time and money just by tweaking their system and data-pulling process.

Interested in seeing how automated reporting can give your business a leg up on the competition? Feel free to reach out to me!