What's New With Report Writing Software?

By: Gen Wright Click author's name for more of his/her articles

Report writing software is an old product. After all, for as long as computers have been used in business, executives have wanted to use them to track performance. How can you tell what a service is really costing you? What are all the costs associated with one department? Are you buying too much of one item?

These are all questions that businessmen face on a daily basis, and the answers can save hundreds of thousands of dollars. A company president who is able to log his employees' hours spent doing a particular job may have some serious questions about his business if he has paid out 6,000 hours of work in a year but in reality can only account for 1,500 hours worth of that labor. At $20 per hour, that is a discrepancy of $90,000 in one department alone!

You can see how report writing software that is capable of monitoring details such as these and then displaying them in an easy-to-read manner might be an advantage to any business owner, small or large. If you fall into either category, you are doing yourself and your business a disservice by not staying up-to-date with the cutting-edge, easy-to-use technologies available to you.

Four Changes in the Report Writing Software Space

1. Easier customization. In the old days, a business owner may have had to hire a reporting programmer to design reports based around the specific needs of his business. This was very costly and time-consuming to all involved. If something unimportant in the past suddenly became important, the programmer would have to go back in and modify the software. Today, things have changed. Ad hoc reporting, or reporting done "for this purpose," allows the business owner to pick and choose the view of the data that is important to him or her.

2. More complex understanding of business needs. One of the greatest changes to report writing software since its initial inception is the years of trial and error that have led business owners and programmers to an understanding of what criteria are important to specific fields. This has facilitated more relevant software to both small and large business owners and made the reading of reports much easier to digest.

3. Audience-friendly presentation formats. Show your findings in an easy-to-understand format, and avoid disconnects between your numbers and your message that too often occurs in a presentation. If you are trying to show your market share of a specific industry, a pie chart may beat a graph or sheet of numbers. Report writing software today will allow you a range of visuals to better communicate your results.

4. Advanced storage and security. Storage was always an issue in the old days of report writing software. What would you do with all that data? Your business wasn't going anywhere (hopefully). Wouldn't the demands (over time) lead to storage and security issues? Many report writing software programs today are server-based and access your data from more than one site in the event of an emergency, so your data will always be safe, secure, and backed-up.

The more you integrate report writing software into your daily business needs, the more you will understand the criteria that are most important to your bottom line, and that leads to the greatest advantage of report writing software: taking charge of your business so you may improve your performance.