Automated report in practice
An automated report is a document or an email that gathers your business figures and delivers them at set times: every evening, every Monday, at the end of the month. The system reads the data where it already lives (till, online shop, management software), adds it up and lays it out in a readable format, often a PDF or a table.
The benefit isn't only the time saved filling in Excel sheets. When the figures arrive on time and always in the same format, you actually look at them: you spot a dip sooner and compare one period with another effortlessly.
One example is the daily sales report we built as a sample project: it collects sales from the shop, online and phone orders and emails a PDF report every evening. What starts it at the set time is a cron job.
A tip: ask yourself which three or four figures you really need to make decisions and start with those, because a report with thirty items ends up unread. In the first few weeks, check the data against figures you already know: a report is only as reliable as the sources it reads. If you'd rather explore the data freely, you need a dashboard connected to the database more than a fixed report.
