Top 5 ways to revamp your reporting in the new year

Once you’ve put in the research and effort to set up your reports and analytics capabilities within your application, it’s natural to feel like you’ve crossed off a major task and moved it to the “completed” items on your to-do list. However, regardless of how thoroughly you set up your reporting, you should regularly update your strategy to stay competitive in today’s fast-moving business environment.

Why you should revisit your reports

With approximately 75% of companies  planning to adopt new technology over the next four years, performance metrics can change rapidly. Information highly relevant to business objectives in the recent past can be irrelevant with shifts in technical capabilities or company objectives. Reviewing reports will ensure your end users are getting the most valuable insights from your analytics and driving decisions that impact your bottom line.

Maintain accuracy and relevance

To be useful, reports need to be accurate and relevant. Deeply understanding a metric that doesn’t relate to accomplishing a business objective is a waste of time. This is one of the trickiest parts of effective analytics, as new applications are quickly changing how businesses work. For example, a customer service department that has historically used time spent on calls as a measure of productivity may find that number largely irrelevant if it recently implemented customer service AI agents to handle the majority of customer concerns.

Improve decision-making

End users rely on reporting to drive data-based decision-making. Making decisions based on outdated or inaccurate data is a recipe for disaster. Updating your reports to connect to all relevant systems and data points will give your end users high-quality insights that can drive strategic improvements.

Enhance communication and transparency

Even if data is accurate, updated, and relevant and contains all the information end users need to make informed decisions, it won’t be useful unless it’s clearly communicated to the right stakeholders. Revisiting your analytics capabilities will allow you to generate intuitive reports that are easy for even non-technical stakeholders to understand. Make sure your report distribution lists and schedules are updated so the right people are getting the right reports at the right time.

Increase efficiency and productivity

Comprehensive and transparent reports lead to actionable insight that end users can leverage to increase efficiency and productivity — whether through accurately measuring performance or determining how to best allocate resources. Updated reports can also identify bottlenecks in workflows that users can target for improvements.

A step-by-step guide to improving reports

Revisiting your reports won’t be as complex and time-consuming as establishing them in the first place. However, you’ll benefit from taking a structured approach.

Gather feedback

Start by soliciting feedback from your end users about how they use their reports. You can do this through focus groups, email surveys, or in-app feedback mechanisms. Some questions you can ask:

• Which sections of a report are the most useful?
• What areas were unclear or unnecessary?
• Were there any missing data points that would have been helpful?

Analyze the current state

Knowing where you stand currently is critical to making progress. Review your objectives to reaffirm them or determine any changes. Based on your objectives, assess how well your methods are working. In particular, evaluate the design and how it’s meeting your end users’ needs.

Identify areas for improvement

Based on your findings to this point, identify areas where your reporting can work better. Some potential areas:

Content

By adding or removing data, you may be able to create better reports. You may need to clarify explanations or provide more context to make the data more accessible and actionable. Focusing on key metrics can highlight the most useful information while allowing end users to dive deeper if they want.

Design

Design isn’t about making decorative changes. Improving the visual appeal of charts and graphs makes them simpler to understand and easier to act on. Look into improving readability with better formatting.

Delivery

You may be able to make your reports more valuable to your customers by offering more delivery options. Consider implementing interactive dashboards and customizable presentations. With more people accessing data analytics through smartphones or tablets, mobile optimization can make reports easier to read and access.

Implement changes and iterate

After you’ve identified what changes you want to make, prioritize them based on which will have the biggest impact. Implement the ones that will improve usability the most and then work your way down the list to less impactful measures.

Test your changes by experimenting with different approaches. Solicit further feedback from your end users or focus groups and use it to further refine your changes.

Examples of specific improvements

Most reporting platforms can benefit from the following types of improvements:

Better visualizations

Good visualizations can quickly convey complex information from dense data tables. Charts and graphs are simpler to understand than raw data, and users can more readily identify trends, correlations, and root causes using visual data.

Add an executive summary

Not everyone who checks a report needs detailed information about every variable. By having a concise overview of the key findings, stakeholders who need to understand what’s going on but don’t need to get bogged down in the specifics can stay informed.

Use clear headings and subheadings

Similarly, by breaking up reports into different sections and using simple, relevant headings and subheadings, you’ll make it easy for your end users to find the information they need. Not all sections of a report will be significant for everyone. Providing quick access to different sections will foster more efficient collaboration among different individuals and teams.

Highlight key takeaways

Use strong visual elements such as color-coding or call-out boxes to emphasize the most important points. Users can follow up if they need more detail but will gain an immediate understanding with just a glance.

Incorporate interactive elements

Interactive reports are more engaging as well as more informative. By letting users directly engage with data through reporting features such as filters, drill-down or drill-up operations, dashlets, and different views, you allow them to find the information that’s most useful to them.

How Jaspersoft can help

Jaspersoft provides a customizable, flexible, scalable reporting and analytics platform you can embed in your applications to drive strategic decision-making for your end users. Our latest updates include UI improvements for more intuitive use.

We’ve also included Ad Hoc settings so you can enable self-service reporting for end-user exploration. The new Drill Down and Alerts features lets users get a more granular view of the data when needed while monitoring the data and notifying relevant stakeholders when there is any significant change.

These new updates, along with many more, such as security and observability improvements, empower you to create more value for your end users through dynamic, interactive reporting. Contact us today to learn more.