Business Reporting: 3 Important Reports for Business Success

There's a lot to track while you're a company owner, from keeping tabs on your cash flow to maintaining financial records. It's important to monitor this information and data to keep on top of things, but you can't stop there.

You need to work on stepping up your business and examine all this knowledge to find valuable insight into how your company is doing. By doing so, in order to evolve and improve, you will figure out what is working, what is not, and what you need to adjust.

Business reporting may help you evaluate a specific problem or collection of circumstances that contribute to your business's success, whether you need deeper visibility into your market patterns or an evaluation of your financial operations. So any company owner or decision-maker will (and should) understand what a report goes into writing.

Why Is Business Reporting Important?

Business reporting makes it easier for the core business to be measured and its overall health evaluated. Business reporting gives you an easy way to recognize challenges or achievements with the right software so that you can address certain issues or encourage results. They also give you an indicator as to whether your targets are being met. You can strategically prepare for the future with that knowledge.

What Goes Into Business Reporting?

There is one thing business reporting really needs: data. That knowledge should concentrate on a particular part of your organization and, preferably, be visualized in a way that makes it easy to understand what's going on.

You may be familiar with a business report that is somewhat more formal if you work or have worked at a larger organization. If you need to share the data with other people, more formal business reports are useful as they typically contain some written analysis of the data.

Here are ways to get the most out of your business results, whether you need to write something more structured or only analyze data for your own purposes: 

Identify the problem: It's good to know what you want to find out if you go through your reporting tool, whether it's revenue or inventory, or employee performance.

If you need to write up something more structured or you're only reviewing data for your own purposes, here are ways to get the most out of your business reports:

Example: At this time of year, sales tend to be slower than they normally are. 

Explore the problem: Start looking at the knowledge from any possible angle once you've determined what you want to explore. The more you look at the data, the more insights you might be able to gather.

Example: We see a 10 percent decline in last year's revenue. The data shows that the average transaction size has fallen while we've seen a comparable amount of transactions. 

Inform suggestions: Once you have an idea of what's going on with your business, you need to determine how you can either solve the problem or promote similar outcomes. You might also consider doing nothing in some situations.

Example: We could market a $20 off $100 offer that rewards larger transaction sizes.

Three Categories Of Must-Have Business Reports

For any part of your company, you can produce a business report, but here are three forms that are especially useful:

Sales reports

Sales are the business's lifeblood. In order to make sure your company is stable, sales reports will help you evaluate patterns in sales volume over time. To see if you need to change your sales plan, you can build them at any time. The sales overview, selling patterns, and item sales reports are some examples of typical sales reports.

Inventory reports

For several firms, performing inventory audits and handling stocks are day-to-day functions. They give you an up-to-date overview of the inventory you have on hand if inventory reports are periodically updated. They are useful for understanding requirements for restocking, assisting with the process of reconciliation, and assessing potential inventory needs.

Some examples of inventory reports are inventory ranking reports, which rank products in descending order by gross margin produced, and inventory hit reports, which rank products based on sales volume.

Payroll reports

Your most important resource as a business owner is your staff. For a selected time span, payroll reports allow you to access all paycheck data, employee totals, employee pay stubs, or business totals. In addition, to help measure your average monthly payroll and make it easier to apply for these loans, you can access your Payroll Protection Program (PPP) report.

Creating Business Reports with Harkster

As a company owner, you have a lot to juggle, and having the time to produce these reports can be a challenge. The good news is using a platform to create and publish bite-sized reports from Harkster; you can save time and yet still get to share the details or information.

Business reporting makes it so much easier when you have the data stored, and each employee is updated every time a new report or new email is posted.