Business data is used to uncover areas of decreased performance, areas of opportunity and offers ways to future-proof your business for more streamlined operations. When it comes to data, reporting, insight analytics and Business Intelligence are the various methods available for uncovering the valuable information and connections within the data. Here’s a look at what they work.
What is business reporting?
Business reporting looks back over past operations to give an indication of the status of the business. It’s an essential and valuable tool for businesses of any size, to track and analyse the performance, identifying areas of opportunity and growth.
Reports will often use standard formats to assist employees in their daily, weekly or monthly duties. Reporting tends to be done by compiling and reviewing information that is specific to an area of operation, such as sales, inventory control and finance. Some forms of business reporting are actually a legal requirement, such as financial reports, with business reports often needed by board members and stakeholders.
Business reports are able to provide a critical analysis of business operations throughout the organisation, giving managers the opportunity to make recommendations on the information gathered.
What are the types of business reports?
The different business reports will provide insight in different areas of operation. Here’s a look at some of the reporting options:
- Inventory stock reports: These monitor the movement of inventory stock to identify loss, dead stock and areas of underperformance.
- Trend analysis reports: These analyse statistical trends to identify growth opportunities.
- Financial reports: These track revenue and profit objectives, providing insights into discrepancies between financial results and forecasts.
- Market analysis reports: These gives decision-makers insight into where they should allocate resources.
- Performance reports: These help set Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), benchmarks and business goals.
- Operational analysis reports: These show how efficiently a company is operating.
What are analytical insights?
Business Analytics (BA) uses data mining, statistical analysis and predictive modelling to anticipate trends and make decisions. Data analytics (or just analytics) refers to the technical process of data mining, cleaning data, transforming data and building systems for data.
With analytics, businesses use tools to examine data as a way to identify patterns, trends and relationships. These are then used to provide new business insights and help businesses make data-driven decisions. Quality data analytics’ tools will take data from a variety of relevant data sources to answer questions about business operations. When referring to ‘insight’ in the context of data, this is when previously unknown relationships or variables are revealed through the analytics – effectively the value obtained through analytics.
Analytical insights can be used to ignite new marketing campaigns, streamline operations and lead to other actions that increase efficiency, revenue and profits.
Read More: How data analytics differs from business intelligence
What is Business Intelligence?
Business Intelligence (BI) is the process of collecting, storing and analysing data for business operations. However, unlike BA, BI uses near-real-time data analysis better business decision-making.
BI tools were created for flexibility, whereby business data can be extracted from a range of data sources. This tends to be a lot less technical than BA, with BI software operated by non-technical users who need immediate answers to operational questions.
Canvas Intelligence provides data-driven solutions to help you track operational efficiencies, control budgets and manage costs in real-time. Connecting with several data sources, the Canvas system will simplify data preparation for clear insights that drive business results. To find out which data-driven software is suited to your business, contact Canvas Intelligence today!
