What Is A Business Report?

A business report is a tool that helps collect and analyze historical and current data
from a company’s operations, production, and more. Through various types of
business reports, organizations make critical decisions to ensure growth and
operational efficiency.

To understand the best uses for these reports, it’s essential to properly define them.
According to authors Lesikar and Pettit, “A corporate-style report is an orderly,
objective communication of factual information that serves some organizational
purpose”. It organizes information for a specific business purpose. While some
reports will go into a more detailed approach to analyzing the functionality and
strategies of a department, other examples of business reports will be more
concentrated on the bigger picture of organizational management, for example,
investor relations. That’s where the magic of these kinds of reports truly shines: no
matter for which company goal you need, their usage can be various and, at the
same time, practical.

Traditional business reports are often static and text reach (bullet points, headings,
subheadings, etc.). Classically formatted in sections such as the summary, table of
contents, introduction, body, and conclusion, this report format is no longer the most
efficient when it comes to extracting the needed insights to succeed in this fast-
paced world. On one hand, by the time these reports have been finished, the insights
included within them might not be useful anymore. On the other hand, the fact that it
is mostly text and numbers makes them hard to understand, making the analysis
strategy segregated and inefficient.

The visual nature of modern business dashboards leaves all the aforementioned
issues in the past. Thanks to interactive data visualizations and modern business
intelligence solutions, the analysis sequence can be done fast and efficiently while
empowering non-technical users to rely on digital insights for their decision-making
process.

What Are Business Reports & Why

They Are Important

In your daily operations, you likely notice your processes and ‘activities’ constantly
changing – sales trends and volume, marketing performance metrics, warehouse
operational shifts, or inventory management changes, among many others.

All these little alterations in your organizational activities are impacting the global
well-being of your company, your warehouse, your restaurant, or even your
healthcare facility. Whether you manage a big or small company, business reports
must be incorporated to establish goals, track operations, and strategy to get an in-
depth view of the overall company state.

But with so much information being collected daily from every department, static
business reports created manually will not give your company the fresh insights it
needs to stay competitive. Businesses that want to succeed in today’s crowded
market need to leverage the power of their insights in an accessible and efficient
way. This is where modern business reports created with interactive data
visualizations come to the rescue.

Traditional means of reporting are tedious and time-consuming. Due to how the
human brain processes information, presenting insights in charts or graphs to
visualize significant amounts of complex information is more accessible and
intuitive. Thanks to modern, user-friendly online data analysis tools armed with
powerful visualizations, companies can benefit from interactive reports that are
accessible and understandable for everyone without needing prior technical skills.

Here, we take the time to define a business report, explore visual report examples,
and look at how to create them for various needs, goals, and objectives. In the
process, we will use online data visualization software to interact with and drill
deeper into bits and pieces of relevant data. Let's get started.

Types Of Business Reports?

Before creating your business outcome reports, it is important to consider your core
goals and objectives. This way, you can pick the correct type of report for each
situation. Here, we present you with five common types of visual reports that you can
use for different analytical purposes.

1. Analytical reports
Analytical reports are reporting tools that use qualitative and quantitative data to
analyze the performance of a business strategy or as support when a company
needs to make important decisions. A modern analytical dashboard created with
top reporting software can include statistics, historical data, as well as forecasts, and
real-time information. Let’s look into it with a sales example.
 **click to enlarge**

This visually appealing business analysis report contains relevant sales KPIs to
measure performance, such as the average revenue per unit, the customer lifetime
value, acquisition costs, and some sales targets to be met. The value of this
analytical report lies in the fact that you get a lot of relevant metrics in a single
dashboard. The data can be filtered and explored on different time frames such as
daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly, depending on the discussion that it needs to
support.

With this kind of sample in hand, managers can quickly understand if they are
meeting their targets, find improvement opportunities, get a bigger picture of their
sales, and find efficient ways to proceed with new strategies.

2. Research reports
Next in our types of business reports that we will discuss is a research report.
Companies often use these kinds of reports to test the viability of a new product,
study a new geographical area to sell, or understand their customer’s perception of
their brand image. To generate this type of report, managers often contact market
research agencies to gather all the relevant information related to the studied topic.
This brand analysis dashboard is a great example.
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The image above is a business report template of a brand analysis. Here, we can
see the results of a survey that was conducted to understand the brand’s public
perception on different topics. The value of this market research dashboard lies in its
interactivity. Often, research reports are depicted in long and static PowerPoint
presentations. With a modern market research dashboard like this one, all the info
can be filtered upon need, and the whole presentation of results can be done on one
screen. For example, if you want to know the brand awareness of a particular region
or age group, you just have to click on the graphs, and the entire dashboard will be
filtered based on this information. Like this, the analysis sequence is fast, interactive,
and efficient.

3. Industry reports
Following on from the research topic, our next type is an industry report.
Benchmarks and targets are excellent ways to measure a company’s performance
and success. But, these targets need to be based on realistic values, especially
considering how crowded and competitive today’s markets are. For this purpose,
companies perform industry reports. By getting a clear picture of the average
industry numbers, such as the competitive landscape, industry size, economic
indicators, and trends, they can plan smart strategies and create realistic targets for
performance.
Source: Business Wire
**click to enlarge**

Let's take this industry report by Technavio about the Global Ice Cream Market as an
example. Here, we can see relevant numbers concerning the ice cream market, how
COVID-19 impacted it, and what is expected to happen between the years 2020-
2024. For example, the business report sample shows that the pandemic has
positively impacted the ice cream market and that it grew 4.33% during 2020. The
report also shows that there is increasing popularity of plant-based ice cream and
that this trend is driving market growth. This is invaluable information for an ice
cream company as they can invest in new products with almost certain success.

4. Progress reports
Next, we have progress reports. Unlike our other examples, this type of business
report is not necessarily based on deep research or advanced analytics but rather on
delivering a clear picture of the performance of a particular area or business goal.
Their visual nature makes them the perfect tool to support meetings or business
discussions as they provide a glance into the status of different metrics. A common
use of progress reports is with KPI scorecards. Let’s look at an example.
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The image above is a business report example of a balanced scorecard. The goal
here is to quickly understand the development of metrics related to 4 key business
areas: financial, customers, learning and growth, and internal objectives. Each of
these metrics is displayed in a current value and compared to a set target. Paired
with this, the template has five colors for the performance status. This allows anyone
who uses this report to quickly understand just by looking at the colors if the target is
being met.

5. By business function
Getting a bigger picture of a company’s performance is a great benefit of the best
business reports. But, apart from helping the company as a whole, the real value of
these reports lies in the fact that they empower departments to leverage the power of
data analysis for their decision-making process. Instead of the sales department,
human resources, or logistics, your entire organization will be data-driven. Let’s look
at it with a business report example by function on marketing.
 **click to enlarge**

Created with modern marketing dashboard software, this example entirely focuses
on the development of marketing campaigns. With metrics such as the total number
of impressions, clicks, acquisitions, and cost per acquisition being depicted on
intuitive gauge charts, you quickly get a clear understanding of the performance of
your campaigns. Through this, you can spot any inefficiencies before they become
bigger issues and find improvement opportunities to ensure your marketing efforts
are paying off. If you want to dig even deeper, this interactive business report can be
filtered for specific campaigns so you only see related insights, making this
dashboard the perfect tool to support team meetings.