Do Your Reports Fall Short?

If you’re a business owner or manager, you need to make sure you’re on track to meet your goals. Are your reports helping you get there, or are they simply slowing you down?

Every financial year, we all set ourselves new goals, creating personal plans and refining what we want our business to achieve. But a plan is no good if it’s not regularly reviewed. You need to know if you’re progressing towards your ultimate goals. The best way to measure outcomes is to examine business reports regularly.

If you asked your team: do you have questions about the weekly, monthly or yearly reports? What would their answer be? The common answer is that staff do not receive reports, and therefore, cannot ask questions about them. Very few employees know how to report on their work. But this points to a systematic flaw: how well is work is carried out? And how is it measured?

Metrics for measuring outcomes

Informative business reports are essential to every business owner. The only way to tell what’s really going on in the business is to have a trend and comparative view of business reports. Let’s look at some specific areas.

Revenues need to grow in any business. As a manager, you want to know what product is giving you the highest revenue and in which month of the year it happened. You may also want to monitor the trends over weeks and compare against other periods – months, quarters or years. As for expenses, similar reviews and benchmarks apply.

In order to generate the revenues, you need a sales plan. Before executing a plan, your sales must be reviewed. This means monitoring your sales pipeline. You need to know how much effort each sale took, for example, from each sales agent in the business. Often, 80% of your sales come from 20% of your sales team. If you can establish what’s working well, you can focus your sales efforts there.

If your staff-generated reports do not provide you with accurate, timely and comprehensive information, then you should consider a business solution like Timemaster. The smart system allows your projects, time, expenses, resource and invoice-data to be captured in one integrated place.

Timemaster’s reporting and analytic features enable business owners, and managers like you, to easily review business reports. This also enables you to review business reports regularly and to create bespoke reports whenever your business needs to change. This agility is important for your business’ success. Let an employed solution take care of your everyday business needs. And remember, for the right results, use the right reports.