What Is Reporting?

In this blog, I will discuss how regular reporting in a business is beneficial and describe several popular report types. We’ll look at Bold reporting tools and how they can ease business operations.

Agenda

• What is reporting?
• Benefits of reporting
• Top 5 types of reports
• What is a reporting tool?
• Bold Reports
• Conclusion

What is reporting?

Setting clear goals and benchmarks for them is necessary for a company to grow. Company leaders also need a way to track progress toward those goals, which is where reports become essential. Presenting regular reports that clearly demonstrate how effective business strategies have been and where the company is in relation to its goals is a lot easier with a reporting management system. Once set up, it tracks company metrics that can be pulled for presentation at any time, saving department leads much time and effort finding the data they need. A sound reporting system is a good foundation for successful strategy execution.

Benefits of reporting

1. Providing information

Through reporting, your organization can communicate efforts and present relevant numbers to its consumers, investors, or value chain partners in a practical, standardized way. When the organization provides easily understandable metrics, investors can feel more confident in its future, and conscientious consumers can have more faith in its products. This is the most important benefit because readily available data brings trust to the organization.

2. Commitment to transparency

Reporting displays your organization’s commitment to transparency, which helps to establish trust between the organization and its stakeholders. Transparency builds bridges between teams and lets them solve problems more quicker. The transparency of clear and accurate reporting also helps keep employees informed about successes and failures and the company’s trajectory. Employees who feel they understand and are important to the company’s strategy are more likely to give their all.

3. Attracting investment

A sensible investor wants to know the risk associated with their investments. By making your company’s complete environmental, social, and governance (ESG) risk information available in one comprehensive package, you will increase your chances of attracting the intended capital. A good reporting plan will help organizations in market research, profit margin projections, and case studies. A good organization should have a detailed plan of how much money is already invested and how much capital infusion is still needed to take the business organization to the next level.

4. Competitive advantage

Reporting provides your company with a competitive advantage by:

• Distinguishing your company from competitors.
• Reducing costs.
• Attracting new consumers.
• Attracting and retaining motivated and skilled employees.
• Improving performance.

It’s also important for companies to prove their sustainability these days. To reach sustainability targets, it is vital to start measuring your organization’s current impact. Measuring impact allows your organization to improve its performance and smash its sustainability financial goals. With this, the organization can take the lead in producing goods and rendering services better or cheaper than its rivals, depending on the goals the organization chooses.

Top 5 types of reports

There are many types of reports. The most popular report types are: informational, proposal, periodic, and functional. All these reports contain information that can be used for different purposes. For example, a report’s purpose may be to track the progress of your strategies or stay compliant with financial protocol. Let’s take a look at these top five report types.

I. Informational report

An informational report is one that contains detailed facts sans analysis. This includes timeline reports like annual reports, financial reports, performance reports, and expense reports. Information reports only provide details about a situation, not propose solutions or hypotheses.

II. Proposal report

A proposal report lets a writer suggest an idea for resolving a problem. One of the benefits of creating a report proposal is that it provides an overview of the entire resolution process. With the proposal report, the organization’s leaders can gauge new approaches, identify problems with them, project benefits, and estimate a budget by outlining entire ideas.

III. Periodic report

A periodic report is a document that companies are required to file with governments in most countries with updates on the companies’ business operations. When used internally, a periodic report gives readers an analysis of current trends in the company and a comparison with its historical performance.

IV. Formal reports

Formal reports are professional, structured, and objective. In other words, they are well-researched, often long, and written in a business style that doesn’t include first-person or second-person pronouns or narrative.

V. Informal reports

Informal reports are the opposite of formal reports, containing casual language to communicate directly. They may be as short as an internal memo or a couple of pages long. They contain information, but it’s not likely to be deeply researched, are presented in the first person, and often has writing considered less professional, like contractions.

What is a reporting tool?

Reporting tools take data from different sources and present it in visuals like charts, maps, and cards so that the information can be shared easily and future trends extrapolated.

Bold Reports

Bold Reports is a powerful reporting tool for transforming and visualizing business data so companies can make faster, data-driven decisions. Bold Reports offers data preparation features that make reporting easier. With Bold Reports, there is no requirement to bring all your data into one data store. Your organization can connect directly to a data store of your choice, saving you time and effort.

Report Server

A report server is an enterprise report management system for creating and managing users, schedules, and reports and then sharing those reports with stakeholders for collaboration. The Bold Reports Report Server embeds powerful reporting in your organization’s software so you can visualize your data and distribute reports from within familiar apps.

Benefits of the Report Server

i. Deploy anywhere

The Report Server enables you to choose the deployment environment that suits your needs:

• On-premises: The Report Server can be deployed on your company servers. Such deployments are self-contained and do not require connection to any environment outside your control.
• Cloud neutral: The Report Server is truly cloud neutral. If you choose to deploy on a public cloud, you can do so easily. Deploy on Azure, Amazon Web Services, the Google Cloud Platform, Digital Ocean, and more.
• Azure App Service: The Report Server can also be configured for deployment on the Azure App Service platform. Bold Reports can transparently scale in accordance with your needs.

ii. White label and distribute

Bold Reports can be white-labeled. It can be branded as your own through the following:

• Globalization and localization: Easily build applications to be used by a global audience in various languages using culture settings and localizing static text.
• Logos and copyright: You can rebrand the logos and copyright information of the Bold Report Server for your organization.
• Redistribute: Redistribute our BI reporting with your product with silent installation.

iii. Multiple export formats

Save professional reports in the most commonly used file formats and share them with analysts and users so they can build action plans to meet their business goals:

• Export formats: Export reports in the most common formats: PDF, Excel, CSV, Word, PowerPoint, XML, and HTML.
• Silently print reports:​ End users can silently print reports without rendering them on a webpage.
• Print preview: Customize the print and export settings in the preview.

iv. Easy migration from SSRS

Bold Reports utilizes the Microsoft SSRS RDL/RDLC standard that allows effortless, complete migration:

• SSRS RDL/RDLC standard: Bold Reports was built with the Microsoft SSRS RDL/RDLC XML schema standards.
• Reuse reports: Reuse reports from Microsoft SSRS in Bold Reports or vice versa without recreating them.
• Zero effort: No code or effort and a minimal learning curve are required to migrate from Microsoft SSRS.

Embedded Reporting

Bold Reports’ on-premises, web-based report management system offers an end-to-end solution for creating, storing, managing, sharing, and scheduling reports with the following features.

Bold Reports Report Designer

The Bold Reports Report Designer (for web and desktop) transforms data into insightful SSRS RDL/RDLC reports without a single line of code. With the Report Designer, you can:

a. Connect to any data source

The Report Designer can add additional data providers to connect to your database or extend the functionalities of the existing data providers. .NET Framework-compatible custom data-processing extensions can be created using a data extension interface. With minimal configuration, you can use any additional data source, such as OData, SASS, Web API, MySQL, SQLite, PostgreSQL, or MongoDB, in the Report Designer.

b. Create data models using the query builder ​

Using Report Designer, data query generation can be done with a few clicks. The easy-to-use, drag-and-drop query builder helps technical and nontechnical users create and view relationships between tables.

c. Data visualization

Visualize your data powerfully using a variety of report items:

Basic items: Text box, image, line, and rectangle.

Data region items: Table, matrix (pivot table), and list.

Data visualization: Charts, sparklines, data bars, gauges, indicators, and maps.

Nested reports: Subreports.

Custom report items: Barcodes, QR barcodes, and more.

Bold Reports Report Viewer

Bold Reports’ web-based Report Viewer visualizes data in meaningful ways and exports SSRS RDL and RDLC reports. With the Report Viewer, you can:

a. Load a report from any source

View reports from external servers, Microsoft SSRS, SharePoint, your local system, or those embedded in any applications.

b. Present your data

Visualize your information with unmatched clarity by highlighting data on demand. Supported data customization options include:

• HTML/rich text rendering.
• Conditional formatting.
• Simple and complex expressions.

Bold Reports Report Writer

Programmatically create and export SSRS, RDL, and RDLC reports to PDF, Word, Excel, and more. With Report Writer, you can:

a. Create SSRS RDL/RDLC reports programmatically in C#​

Use simple APIs to programmatically create SSRS RDL/RDLC reports in C# and change report item properties without using a visual design interface.

b. Export in multiple formats

Export reports in commonly used file formats, like PDF, Word, Excel, CSV, PowerPoint, XML, and HTML.

Embedded reporting needs to be customizable and extensible to meet the needs of enterprise applications. Bold Reports provides features that make it especially suited for embedded use. You can integrate reporting tools into commonly used development platforms like .NET/.NET Core, Angular, React, Vue, Blazor, WPF, and UWP.

Conclusion

I hope this blog provides a clear idea of what reporting is. To explore Bold Reports more, look through our demo samples and documentation site.

If you have any questions, please post them in the comments section. You can also contact us through our contact page, or if you already have an account, you can log in to ask your support question.

Bold Reports offers a 15-day free trial without any credit card information required. We welcome you to start a free trial and experience Bold Reports. Try it, and let us know what you think!

Originally published at https://www.boldreports.com on December 15, 2022.