Business intelligence reporting

Business intelligence (BI) reporting is all about clarity and comprehension. It's the art of turning complex datasets into digestible reports that everyone from executives to frontline employees can understand and act upon. With BI reporting, you can:

Monitor key performance indicators (KPIs): Keep a pulse on your business's health by tracking essential metrics that matter most to your success.

Identify trends and patterns: Spot opportunities and risks by analyzing data trends over time, helping you to forecast and plan strategically.

Enhance decision-making: Empower your teams with data-backed insights, ensuring decisions are informed, timely, and aligned with your business objectives.

Improve operational efficiency: Pinpoint areas for optimization by analyzing workflows and processes, leading to cost savings and increased productivity.

At Phocas, we believe that reporting should be a breeze, not a burden. Our BI reporting tools are designed to be intuitive and human-friendly, ensuring that you can:

Access real-time data: Say goodbye to outdated figures. Our reports are as current as your latest data, offering a real-time snapshot of your business.

Customize with ease: Tailor reports to meet your unique business needs without getting tangled in technicalities.

Share insights effortlessly: Collaborate and share reports across your organization in just a few clicks, fostering a data-driven culture.

Drill down to details: Go beyond the surface-level data with the ability to explore data at a granular level, uncovering the 'why' behind the 'what'.

• Reporting focuses on presenting data in summarized, easy-to-understand visualizations and communicating insights through dashboards and static reports. BI does this, but also involves functions like data integration, predictive modeling, advanced analytics etc.
• Reporting is mainly consumed passively by viewers. BI enables interactive analysis for users to dive deeper into data on their own through things like visual data discovery, ad-hoc analysis and what-if scenarios.
• Static reporting delivers snapshots of business data. BI combines historical data with analysis techniques like data mining, statistical analysis, machine learning to uncover patterns and future projections.
• Pre-defined reports have fixed layouts focused on tracking historical KPIs. BI allows flexible, user-defined reporting to explore many perspectives.
• Reporting tools help visualize data from warehouses and databases. BI also offers capabilities to integrate, clean, transform and enrich data for reliability.

1. Descriptive Reports: These reports answer the question ‘what happened’ for businesses over a certain period. They include data analysis of sales figures, financial statements, and other performance metrics.
2. Diagnostic Reports: Diagnostic reports go beyond the 'what' to explore the 'why'. They analyze data to uncover business decisions behind performance trends, such as why sales dipped in a particular quarter.
3. Predictive Reports: Predictive reports use historical data to forecast ‘what could happen’. They help businesses anticipate market movements, customer behavior, and potential opportunities or risks.

User-Friendliness: Choose a tool that is intuitive and easy for all users, regardless of their technical expertise.

Data Integrations: Ensure the tool has a range of connectors for a variety data sources, including your ERP system. If one of your business peers using the same ERP has integrated smoothly with the tool, ask about their user experience.

Customization: Look for the ability to customize reports to fit your specific business needs and KPIs. Again, ensure customizations can be performed by everyone - not just the data experts.

Real-Time Analysis: Select a tool that collates data as close to real-time as possible for up-to-date decision-making.

1. Collaboration Features: Collaboration capabilities are key for sharing insights and making collective decisions.
2. Scalability: The tool should grow with your business, handling increased data volume and complexity over time. Query whether the provider has FP&A capabilities such as Financial Statement, Budgets & Forecasts and Rebates software.
3. Support and Training: Adequate support and training resources are essential for maximizing your chosen BI reporting and analytics platform's value. Ensure they have dedicated support teams located in offices globally.