The traditional way of reporting involved communicating in plain text with numbers where the focus was on covering all required related data and information. Owing to paper-based reports, either the reports would be a big fat pile of papers or it would lack some important information delaying management decision process. With the advent of the internet, data processing in today’s age has made the reporting real-time, customizable and Relevant. With petabytes of data available with advanced analytics, it is necessary to develop reports that are interesting and relevant.

1) Visually pleasing reports supported by infographics
As the humans lack the capacity to process a huge amount of data, it is important to present them in a form which makes finding conclusion easy. The main aim of reporting today is not to report data but to present an analysis of it to drive future decision process. Using a combination of text, charts, and images would not only help readers understand the report but also help retain the important aspects of it for future reference.

2) Select the relevant KPIs
With increased data available for analysis, data overload also possess a grave problem while making reports. Deciding the relevancy of data is a big task. However, defining major performance indicators (KPI) and judging the relevancy from the reader’s point of view would ease the selection of relevant data. It also depends on the reader’s organizational position and job role. For example, operations head would be interested in the optimizing his operations at shop floor in contrast to financing head’s concern of achieving the said optimization at minimal cost. One of the best ways to decide KPI is to answer the question of relevance from the reader’s perspective.

3) Add a context to the data points
Just adding visually appealing graphs with a lot of KPI metrics is of no use if inferences and conclusion are not drawn. A manager is expected to not only report hard data but also draw conclusive analysis from them in order to facilitate decision making by higher management. Providing relevant insight from the report helps in the deeper analysis to understand the business situation, keep in place relevant regulations and compliances and implement internal controls in the organization to drive accountability and performance.

4) Digital Reporting
With data available in a digital format easily and access to internet all time, it is time to embrace the power of digital reporting. It provides customized reports with the reader capable to select the relevant KPI and access the information instantaneously. With real-time reporting, it saves time, money and paper. Digital reports can be more interactive allowing the reader to have analysis ranging from just an overview to very detailed analysis.

Using highly interactive digital infographics to analyze relevant KPIs, management would be able to make quick, effective and data-driven decisions.

VComply helps organizations to effectively select the relevant KPIs important for the organization and provides an in-depth analytical report of the various functions of the organization.

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