What is a Business Report? | Importance and Types of Reports

What is a Business Report?

A business report is a bunch of facts written in a systematic way related to a specific business matter as per a set of standard protocols. It helps concerned stakeholders to get a thorough knowledge of the problems and how to overcome the problem.

Business reports are about showcasing a set of business-related information like facts, analysis, figures, and such. The objective of business reports is to give the information in an organized manner which helps to make major decisions and plan for the future. Reports help businesses plan budgets and decide on promotions and advertisements based on the drafted information.

When there are different types of business reports, formatting is a concern to draft a report that makes it easy for the stakeholders to instantly read through the data without missing out on anything.

Types of Business Reports

Analytical Reports

Analytical reports are critical for any company and help in times of crucial decisions. It helps the management to get the relevant data with related descriptions.

For instance, during the quarterly operations analysis, the report would comprise the necessary activities taken by the executive team, the numbers from sales revenue, and the net profit or loss for the quarter.

The analytical reports help the businesses to analyze the business operations that have occurred during the first quarter of the year – this helps businesses to make future decisions.

Informational Reports

Informational reports include non-specific facts that it does not explain the “how to’s” and “what ifs of the scenario. If you require any objective type answers, then an information report is what you must look for. It gives information on the number of employees, departments they work in, number of employees, and what is the role of each employee in the organization.

The information of an organization can be showcased in different ways – it can be in a graph, pie chart, or a table showing the employing details and so on.

Research Reports

Research reports are comprehensive which are required when a company is planning to venture into new areas, like launching a new product in the market or planning an expansion of its office in a new geographical area. A research report includes a specific information on relevant details and stats on a specific topic.

Purpose of Business Reports

Reports are a key to communication in any organization. In big organizations, there are no other options other than reports. It highlights the key points and the purpose of business reports

Transmitting Information: Business reports are the best source to transmit information from one person to the other. In large enterprises, where there are complex data to handle reports comes in handy to managers to acquire necessary information

Interpretation and Explanation of event: Reports helps the users to understand the information easily. It explains and interprets the data to an understandable format.

Making Decisions: A report is a tool to help stakeholders take decisions. A report is the basic management tool for making decisions and to help solve problems.

Communication with external stakeholders: It helps to communicate information to not just the internal stake holders but also with external stakeholders.

Development of knowledge base: Reports also help in establishing a rich source of information base in an organization. It records all the activities of the business operations permanently which are archived for future references.

Controlling: Reports provide the required information to enforce controlling techniques.

Recommending actions: Reports not only provide information but also stands a source to provide solutions to problems.

Importance of Business Reports

Gets everyone on the same page

Business reports are critical and important source of information to all the stakeholders involved in the business. When there is a business plan, such reports play a vital role and it outlines the business finances, strategies and future plans and goals for future growth. It is a medium to communicate about the progress of the business.

Ensures to make quality business decisions

Reports are critical to showcase analytics of the business data which is crucial to take business decisions. There are effective software products available which helps to access crucial data through few clicks

Helps to protects Your Interests

The data reports can be saved for future purpose in case of any security breach or any other critical scenario. It is important to monitor backups on the company’s servers would serve u from any unpredictable mishaps.

Benefits of Business Report an it’s capabilities

Profitability analysis

Quickly see where your make and lose money based on profitability metrics and true employee costs.

Meaningful metrics

Track SLAs, open ticket count, ticket backlogs, time to resolution, and project hours spent on a per-project basis to maximize resource utilization.

Sales forecasting

See which opportunities are likely to close and how much you can expect to make for more accurate forecasts and to estimate potential ROI by opportunity and by employee.

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