Dynamic Reporting: How to Create and Best Tools
Organizations need to be able to make quick, informed decisions to stay competitive. Rapid technological advancements—including AI—are shifting industry and economic trends and changing consumer expectations and demand. More businesses are understanding the value and role of data in becoming more resilient.
Across industries, organizations are incorporating tools like dynamic reporting to access accurate, fresh data required for innovation and agility. Dynamic reporting enables your business to view real-time data holistically to assess your performance and find new opportunities and improve the customer experience to help you adapt and thrive.
What is dynamic reporting?
Dynamic reporting is a type of data analytics that enables organizations to access real-time data and insights. It can automatically generate new reports and visualizations or update existing ones as changes occur in your data sources, so you’re always viewing the most up-to-date information.
Dynamic reporting also allows you to analyze live data through interactive elements. For instance, you can scroll over and expand a chart or graph to gain deeper insights on specific data points or select a filter to further refine your data and visualization by timeframe, role, interests, or goals, to name a few. Interacting with data through dynamic reporting provides more context and richer analysis, so you can find answers from your data and develop more strategic decisions.
Dynamic reporting vs static reporting
Static reporting and dynamic reporting both give your business access to relevant data, but how they do so differs. Unlike dynamic reporting, which updates reports and visuals every time data is added, modified, or removed from data sources for a live view of your data, static reporting only includes data from a previous, specific period of time.
Static reports are ideal if you want to explore your organization’s historical data, such as a year-over-year or quarterly earnings report, or see how a previous trend impacted your sales or marketing metrics. You can share data and visuals from static reporting in presentations or printed documents, but they are not interactive. For this reason, extracting insights from your data may take longer. Static reporting also only gives you a brief snapshot of your business through events that have already occurred. It can’t show you real-time data—meaning any insights you gain may be outdated for the current environment.
In contrast, dynamic reports show the most current data. With dynamic reporting capabilities, your organization can monitor different operations in real time and get alerted when changes happen. It can also track metrics over time, making it a valuable asset for measuring marketing or sales performance. Plus, the interactive nature of dynamic reports allows you to test and plan for different scenarios and create forecasts for your business.
Many organizations take advantage of both types of data reporting, utilizing each for different purposes for a comprehensive approach. For example, you can incorporate static reports to examine key performance indicators (KPIs) from a previous period while also using dynamic reporting to determine how current operations are performing in real time.
Benefits of dynamic reporting
Dynamic reporting offers businesses numerous advantages, including:
- Consolidates data: Instead of pulling data from multiple sources or reports, dynamic reporting tools combine data from disparate sources into one platform. Its interactive elements mean you’ll spend less time sifting through data to find what you need.
- Increases agility with real-time updates: Dynamic reporting allows your business to spot and address changes or problems as they happen, allowing you to respond immediately.
- Generates deeper insights: With dynamic reporting, it’s easier for your employees to dig into and understand data beyond its surface-level information. Increased context about your data can lead to deeper insights and more valuable decisions.
- Enhances alignment and collaboration: Since data updates in real time, you won’t have to worry about teams or departments being out of alignment or using outdated data for business operations. Everyone can easily be on the same page, which also encourages collaboration.
- Improves data accessibility with interactive visualization: Dynamic reporting tools make it easier for all employees to access and understand data, regardless of their technical skills. You don’t have to be a data analyst to discover insights, which helps increase the adoption of the tool and promote a data-driven culture.
- Increases productivity and performance: Access to data as it happens helps everyone improve their work. They can react to developments in real time and adjust their efforts. Additionally, dynamic reporting takes the guesswork out of decision-making, helping to save time and make informed choices.
- Greater customization options and flexibility: You can tailor your reports based on your specific needs or business goals, so you can use one tool across your organization to analyze and share information. Customize your report’s layout, visualizations, or data with just a few clicks.
- Integrates with other technology: Dynamic reporting can handle large volumes of data—including big data—and integrates with other technology like Internet of Things (IoT) devices to monitor data from connected devices in real time. This feature can help you measure and optimize performance, troubleshoot issues, perform predictive maintenance, and improve customer experience.
- Assists with compliance: Since dynamic reports update as data changes, it can help you meet compliance requirements and ensure data is current and accurate for any regulatory reporting needs.
How to create effective dynamic reports
Now that you understand what a dynamic report is and the benefits it can offer your organization, you can learn how to put it into practice. Creating a dynamic report requires a few simple steps.
1. Establish your purpose and goal
Like any other project, you first need to define the purpose of your dynamic report. Are you looking to measure specific metrics? Do you know which audience will be reading this report — a manager or team member, executives, or other stakeholders? Have you determined which data sources you will need? Answering these questions can help guide you to the right metrics and structure for the report.
2. Connect and import your data
Once you know the goal of your report and the relevant metrics needed to support your objective, you can connect to your data sources and import data into your dynamic reporting tool. Many tools automate the process of pulling, cleaning, and syncing data from all selected sources. From there, you can choose the metrics you want to include in your report.
3. Choosing the right data visualizations
After importing your data points, it’s time to select which interactive visualizations you want to use. Dynamic reporting tools offer responsive charts, graphs, gauges, and other widgets that display your text-based data in an easy-to-understand visual format. Think about which visualizations will illustrate your story best. For example, you may want to use a bar chart when comparing categorical data, while a line graph is a more effective choice for displaying variables over time.
4. Utilize filters and drill-down capabilities
Filters and drill-downs can increase the effectiveness of your visualizations. These functionalities allow viewers to select specific data points or time periods and see the high-level overview and more granular details of your data.
5. Design clear and concise reports
Every aspect of your dynamic report should enhance its readability. Make it easy to navigate by incorporating headings or subheadings to guide your audience in a logical manner, and ensure that all visualizations and data points are accurately labeled. Your report should be clear and concise for maximum effectiveness.
Best practices for dynamic reporting
When developing your dynamic reporting, keep these best practices in mind.
Limit your metrics
In dynamic reporting, less is more. You’ll want to limit reports to 10-15 of the most relevant indicators that support your report’s objectives. Too many metrics can cloud a report, making the findings less clear. Plus, a concise report that shares only key information is more likely to hold a viewer’s attention and more effectively make your point.
Ensure data accuracy and integrity
Make sure any data sources you’re using for your dynamic reporting have been validated and verified. Taking this step ensures the accuracy and quality of your data and protects the integrity of your reports and insights. Sources that contain inaccurate, duplicate, or missing data can significantly impact your report’s findings and any subsequent decisions you make. Additionally, consider conducting audits of your data sources regularly and providing training so all authorized personnel are following proper data security measures.
Monitor and analyze report performance
Don’t treat your dynamic reports the same way you would static reports. These reports are meant to be analyzed and understood at a deeper level. Monitor and evaluate the same KPIs over time to spot trends and see how context and past insights are affecting current performance. That way, you can determine if your reports are performing as expected or if you need to look at other areas to help meet your goals.
Collaborate and share reports with stakeholders
Dynamic reports offer valuable insights and help share complex data in an easy-to-understand way with others. Use the findings from your report to collaborate with team members in your department or across the organization. Depending on your needs, authorized employees could access the same data and reports for different purposes, such as using customer data to improve marketing return on investment (ROI) or inventory management.
Dynamic reports also help make data more accessible to executives and stakeholders. You can clearly show how your actions contributed to overall performance and use insights from the report to suggest the next steps. Plus, sharing your dynamic reports with others helps you get valuable feedback on how to best incorporate data for decision-making.
Examples and use cases of dynamic reporting
With dynamic reporting’s real-time data capabilities, businesses across industries are using it to solve their unique challenges and improve performance. Here are a few examples of how to incorporate dynamic reporting into your processes.
Marketing and advertising
Marketing professionals use dynamic reporting to monitor everything from website and ad campaign performance to engagement on social media platforms. You can quickly track metrics like the number of organic versus paid website visitors, click-through rates and ROI of specific email marketing campaigns, or the number of likes, comments, and shares your Instagram or Facebook posts receive in real time.
Sales teams
With dynamic reporting, your sales team can create dashboards to view individual or team operational performance. Often integrated with a customer relationship management (CRM) system, sales reps use dynamic reporting to improve account management and track metrics like call and email volume, opportunities created, and conversion rate to improve overall performance.
Executive reports
Dynamic reporting makes it easy to share current, key organizational information with managers and C-suite executives so they can feel confident making long-term, strategic decisions. You can track real-time revenue growth, sales, or marketing performance, to name a few metrics, and identify trends to help you forecast performance and take steps to reduce risks.
Finance
Finance teams use dynamic reporting to track key financial performance metrics to improve cash flow management or accounts payable or receivable processes. Since data updates in your reports as it changes, it’s also great for managing market and credit risk and detecting changing trends or anomalies in the data that can indicate fraud.
IT and cybersecurity
You can monitor and assess different aspects of your IT performance using dynamic reports, including how effective your team is at resolving issues, your network performance, and system reliability. These reporting tools also identify patterns in IT data and can spot potential security weaknesses, so you can quickly take proactive steps to prevent cyber attacks.
Best dynamic reporting tools
When choosing the right dynamic reporting tool for your business, consider the following:
- Data governance and security: Since you’re using real-time data, which can contain sensitive financial or personal information, there need to be more protections in place to prevent unauthorized access and maintain the integrity of your data. Ensure the tool you select has strong data governance policies that meet your industry’s requirements.
- Scalability and flexibility: Look for a tool that can adapt to your organization’s growth or changing needs, both in terms of data volume and number of employees. It should be able to quickly scale without dropping in performance.
- Collaboration features: Tools with features like comments, dashboard customizations, numerous data visualizations, and drill-downs make it easier to share data and collaborate with others.
- Integrates with your systems: To take full advantage of dynamic reporting’s capabilities, it needs to easily integrate with your company’s other tools and platforms so you’re not wasting time pulling data manually from numerous sources.
- Incorporates emerging technology: More dynamic reporting tools use AI and machine learning (ML) to enhance the cleansing, transforming, and analysis of your data. These features typically automate and speed up more repetitive, mundane tasks so your team can focus on higher-value analytics work.
- User-friendliness: The dynamic reporting tool should be easy for your organization and employees to adopt. Look for tools with intuitive, user-friendly interfaces and drop-down features so the tool is accessible for everyone.
With those factors in mind, here are five top dynamic reporting tools.
Domo
Easily create customized, interactive dynamic reports with Domo’s cloud-based, self-service tool. The user-friendly platform includes a drag-and-drop interface to process data and build visualizations with just a few clicks. The tool also features mobile accessibility and strong data governance, so you can explore data and share insights securely from anywhere. Plus, Domo is a leader in integrations, enabling you to connect all your data sources into one platform for comprehensive data reporting.
Microsoft Power BI
Microsoft’s self-service BI tool offers extensive integration options and is compatible with other Microsoft products. User-friendly features like natural language queries and a customizable reporting dashboard allow for greater data accessibility to technical and non-technical people. It also offers strong data security and governance features to ensure privacy and compliance.
Tableau
This popular reporting tool features a large variety of interactive visualizations. Tableau’s intuitive, drag-and-drop options and free resources make it a great option for non-technical employees. At the same time, it’s powerful enough to analyze extensive data and offers more advanced data reporting options than some other options.
Qlik
Qlik offers on-premise and cloud-based enterprise-level data reporting solutions with integration capabilities to combine and transform data at scale. Its user-friendly associative data engine makes it easy to explore and draw insights from your data, but it does have a steeper learning curve than other reporting tools in this list.
SAP BusinessObjects
This self-service platform allows you to create interactive, role-based reports and dashboards to ensure the right information gets in front of the right people. SAP BusinessObject’s interactive, drag-and-drop dashboard is accessible to those less tech-savvy while still providing advanced-level analytics capabilities. However, it’s only available as an on-premise solution, so those interested in cloud-based dynamic reporting will have to look elsewhere.
Ready to get started with your own dynamic reporting practice? Watch a demo to learn more.