Building an enterprise reporting app for desktop

Why is enterprise reporting important?

Enterprise reporting in the business intelligence context is a process of arranging data into a format that is easy to understand by a target audience. As a rule, reports are comprised of tables, pivot tables, graphs, and text.

There are different types of reports produced with reporting software, but the most common is an analytical report.

Analytical reports assist in deriving insights from business data and transforming the insights into actions and strategies.

A general goal of enterprise reporting is to help departments or a business make decisions data-driven. Examples are reviewing how the company is operating at the moment, comparing its performance over time, and coming up with appropriate business improvements.

Who needs data analytics?

Depending on the company’s role, every employee makes reports once in a while or on a daily basis.

And having a reporting tool at their fingertips is especially critical for those employees whose lion’s share of responsibilities implies doing data analysis and reporting: financial analysts, business analysts, accountants, data journalists, and more. Daily, they collect, research, and analyze different data to help a department make informed decisions. Another no less important duty they have is generating reports based on analysis results.

What makes a good reporting tool?

To see the story behind your data, you can’t go without the right tools.

First of all, a tool should provide all the essential features for profound data analysis via an intuitive interface. Some examples are data grouping, summarizing, filtering, and sorting features. And it’s especially beneficial when these features come out of the box.

Next, analyzing data and creating a report should be as easy as a few clicks. Nothing should distract a data analyst from their objectives.

Since sharing the work results is essential for maintaining teamwork in the company, reports should be easy to save into different formats or print.

Another important aspect of reporting software is its responsiveness and speed of data processing related to real-time calculations.

Finally, reporting tools should react to the ever-changing business needs, meaning they should be flexible enough to be customized upon demand.

A reporting tool can be web-based or desktop.

In this blog post, we will focus mainly on desktop apps for reporting and their benefits.

Desktop software for data analysis

A desktop reporting app is a comfy alternative to web-based solutions since, as a rule, an end-user can run it without an internet connection.

Quite often, people opt to choose Excel as the primary application for enterprise reporting. That’s entirely justified: it offers a rich toolkit of data manipulation and statistical functionality that can be extended further with packages. Especially the pivot table functionality is in high demand since it’s the most convenient way to summarize raw data and show it from a particular angle.

But let’s be honest: it’s not always easy to achieve what you need with Excel Pivot Table. Some of the pain points are:

• Make the pivot table showing the most up-to-date data from the data source.
• The number formatting can get lost once the pivot table is refreshed.
• Each time you want to see the data behind a subtotal or any other aggregated value, a new datasheet is generated.

And so on.

To deal with similar scenarios, you need to come up with workaround solutions and google a lot.

But other alternatives may make reporting smoother and more comfortable.

Let’s talk about one of them.

Interactive pivot table for reporting

A tool I would suggest you try is Flexmonster Pivot Table & Charts — a JavaScript library for data visualization and reporting. There are two ways of using it: by integrating with a web app or a desktop app.

Since it integrates with such front-end technologies as React, Angular, and Vue, you can use ElectronJS to create a reporting app that runs on any operating system.

And fortunately, there are lovely sample projects that are easy and quick to run to get the feeling of which results you can achieve.

If you need to integrate a tool into an existing project, you can follow a few steps from the guide on integrating a pivot table with Electron.

Once you created an app, your end-users can:

• Connect to data from JSON, CSV, SSAS, Elasticsearch data sources.
• Build a pivot table with the drag and drop feature.
• Highlight important values with conditional formatting.
• Switch between different data visualization modes: from the pivot table to pivot charts and vice versa.
• Save reports and restore them quickly later on.
• Export results to PDF, HTML, Excel, etc.

Apart from interactivity, another advantage of such an app is that it takes little RAM to be run and process data.

Wrapping it all up

I hope I’ve inspired you to open your editor and try coding an app that will benefit your company’s enterprise reporting.

Let me share with you some more useful guides that will help you get started:

• Building your first Electron.js application
• Creating a cross-platform app with Electron and pivot table

Live demos:

• An analytical dashboard with the pivot table and pivot charts
• An interactive dashboard with a pivot table and Highcharts

Have fun!