The Benefits of Real-Time Reporting

Making accurate and timely business decisions is integral for business success. The ability to utilize data to supplement and influence future choices can be a complete game changer for business strategies. A factor that plays a key role in achieving these accurate, up-to-date, data-driven decisions is real-time reporting functionality.

In the past, reporting relied solely on historical data, which can be helpful to an extent, but with the evolution of technology and the digital industry, it is almost essential to access information that is updated to the day, minute, and even second. For employees, this business intelligence tool is especially helpful when assisting customers because they have the most recent activity documented and readily available to them in mere seconds. In today’s blog, learn how real-time reporting functionality can offer an abundance of measurable benefits to businesses of all sizes.

To begin, Indeed provides a wonderful comprehensive definition of real-time reporting to help readers comprehend just how powerful of a tool it is:

Real-time reporting is a business intelligence tool related to gathering data. It involves collecting data and relaying it to users immediately, allowing them to view and access important data as soon as it happens. Users may access this data through an online portal, software platform or similar option, and it’s available with the most up-to-date information at all times. It’s also possible for a variety of users, such as a variety of employees or your clients, to access this information if you choose to share it (1).

With that well-established definition of just how vastly beneficial real-time reporting is to entire companies, here are more specific benefits that businesses can achieve,

Decrease Manual Labor: Optimizing employee’s time and allocating their attention to more pressing matters than manual data collection and presentation is a great step towards higher productivity levels. With real-time reporting, data is primarily automatically updated leaving more room for employee productivity and less room for human error. Employees gain more time to focus on tasks that require manual input and only have to review the reports as opposed to manually creating the documents (2).

Easy to Access and Understandable Data: One of the largest benefits of real-time reporting is the ease of access and presentation. Compiling manual reports is extremely time consuming and can be difficult to construct an understandable design. With various software options that offer this business intelligence tool, such as SAP Business One, users can input customization requests for specific data to be presented in various formats. This is incredibly beneficial because the most recent data can seamlessly be presented in visually understandable formatting with little to no manual intervention (1).

Detect Performance Results: Reviewing data is the best way to detect performance within a specific department and an entire business. For example, running a report based on the sales data driven from a marketing campaign can illustrate how great of an impact the campaign had on sales for a specific week, month, year etc. Real-time reporting can be utilized in this way to provide users with the most recent data including historical data to construct the most accurate depiction of performance at any point in time.

In conclusion, real-time reporting is a powerful business intelligence tool that helps businesses achieve their end goals and place them on the path of success. There are software options for every size business that come equipped with real-time reporting functionality.

SAP Business One is the leading ERP solution for small to midsize businesses. Equipped with a suite of completely integrated modules to streamline business processes, Business One offers growing SMBs the scalability, visibility, and flexibility needed to gain competitive advantage and become a SAP best run business. SAP Business One uses real-time updates and reporting functionalities to display the single form of the truth at all times. With extensive customization reporting options, all updated in real-time, users achieve incredible insight to help build the best business strategy and make decisions accurately and efficiently.

Here at Softengine, we are a SAP Gold Partner specializing in SAP Business One implementations for growing small and medium sized businesses. With our client-first approach to ERP implementation, we are ready to help take your business to the next level.

For further inquiries about real-time reporting in SAP Business One and the variety of features and functionalities included in the software, contact one of our specialists at: info@softengine.com

Check out our website for more information about SAP Business One:  https://softengine.com/product/sap-business-one/

Resources:

1. https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/real-time-reporting
2. https://www.jotform.com/blog/real-time-reporting/