Automated Reporting: Make Your Work Easier than You Imagine

Many people ask us about automated reporting. Some wonder what it is or how it works, while others would like to learn how to automate their reports. Today, let's clarify these questions.

1. What is automated reporting?

Automated reporting is the process of regularly sending reports via a variety of ways according to set intervals or triggered tasks. In detail, with the automated reporting software, users can set up the time frame, frequency, or triggered events to send the reports at a specific time. For example, a scheduled report containing the weekly website traffic can be set to automatically send out every Sunday at 10 pm so that the marketing department can use this report to analyze and discuss the traffic performance on Monday morning.

The best part?

You can set the formats of your reports, such as Excel, Word, or PDF. You can also choose different means, including email, SMS, or platform notification, to send your reports.

You might be wondering the time effectiveness of your data:

These reports contain the latest data that automatically extracted from the database thanks to the APIs of automated reporting tools. Besides, the reports can be automatically created based on the stunning templates built in the software.

2. Why should you automate your reports?

Save time and spend time on tasks that only humans can do

The most distinct advantage of automated reporting is to save you time. Creating daily, weekly, or monthly reports manually are of the past. You can set up automated reports that will be sent to whoever you want and will always be up to date, which frees up your time to analyze the data or to communicate the team that only humans can do.

Let’s say you are responsible for the sales reports of 10 stores in your county. You are required to make reports of the sales performance of these 10 stores every month. It usually takes you half of the day to create a single report, and totally you need a whole week to spend on it. With automated reporting software, you just need to set a template, time frame, and frequency at once, which at most takes half of the day.

Reduce human error

Report automation ensures output without human error. Human work often requires double checks, but automation can be accurate since the software takes steps as settings: extract the data, report generation, and then send it.

Anyone can create reports with automation

Once automated, anyone can create reports. In other words, there is no need for a dedicated system or a dedicated system, which can improve efficiency. As a result, the work of existing staff is reduced, and operation and management by a small number of people are stable.

That’s not all…..

The IT department can set automated reports and scheduled emails to email the report to the responsible person for them to track metrics, especially for middle-level managers.

3. Automated reporting process with software

Before, we use python to automate the excel reports. Believe me, you will come back after you see the numbers of code, especially for non-technical users.

Actually, to achieve report automation, only three problems need to be solved: extracting the data, automatically generating reports template, and sending the reports. With the advent of automated reporting tools, report automation is much easier than before. Next, let’s take the FineReport as an example.

Step1 Extracting the data

For most companies, there is hardly a complete system to support the establishment of the reporting platform. The reports can only be summarized and printed in Excel. How difficult it will be for the reporting staff to extract the data.

The first key point is FineReport directly connected to the database. In detail, the data from the database can be centralized in the FineReport and can be updated in real-time according to the fields. If you want to make a report, you can directly extract the data from the database. In the same way, you can also integrate it into the OA and ERP system to pick up data and make reports at any time.

Step2 Automatically generate the reports.

With FineReport, you can save the templates in the platform, and the software will call the templates directly when you need to make reports.

It is easy to fix the templates. The key here is parameter filtering, By adding parameters to the time field that needs to be filtered in daily, weekly and monthly reports, and then adding filtering conditions to the corresponding data grid, settled report template can be made, such as the following:

Besides, when we make the regular reports, inevitably, a lot of data and project progress are involved. At this time, it is difficult to reflect data by simple and boring numbers directly. Instead, you can use the dashboard and progress bar of FineReport to reflect the health of project progress.

Want to know the best part?

If you are still used to Excel, you can directly import the Excel templates to the FineRpeort. That means you can automate the Excel reports without Python!

Step 3 Schedule your automated reports

FineReport has a decision-making system with a powerful timing scheduled function that allows users to quickly and easily set up daily, monthly, quarterly, annual reports, and other tasks without additional work.

After the scheduled tasks are set, the server will automatically complete the set tasks at the appointed time, generate the required files. The generated reports are notified to different objects in various ways such as email, message, and so on. Besides, FineReport can automatically upload scheduled task files to the specified FTP server to prevent loss.

Original Source: https://www.finereport.com/en/reporting-tools/automated-reporting.html