Nowadays, the business intelligence reporting market is heating up. Both the investment community and the IT circle are paying close attention to big data and business intelligence. But do you know what problems BI reporting can solve and what kind of BI reporting tools can be considered good?

1. What is Reporting? 

Reporting is a basic part of Business Intelligence that allows you to collect, extract and dynamically display data in different types of visualizations such as charts and tables, so users can transform data into useful information and discover insights. In other words, you can view reporting as various styles+ dynamic data.

Reports can vary in their interactivity. Static reports cannot be changed by the end-users, while interactive reports allow you to navigate the report through various hierarchies and visualization elements. Interactive reports support drilling down or drilling through multiple data levels at the click of a mouse. You can also use interactive reports to navigate, sort, filter, and view the data to deal with your specific needs. 

2. What is Business Intelligence (BI)?

Business Intelligence(BI)is a process that incorporates analytics, data management, reporting tools, and various methodologies for visualizing, analyzing data, and delivering insightful information that helps executives, managers, and employees make informed business decisions. Business Intelligence initiatives’ ultimate goal is to drive better business decisions that enable organizations to improve efficiency, increase revenue, and gain competitive advantages over business rivals. 

3. Reporting and BI are Used in Different Business Requirements

Many people confuse Reporting software with BI software, refer them to the same thing. But they serve different business needs. 

In conclusion, a professional Reporting tool focuses on data display, typically an application within a business intelligence software suite.

 In contrast, a BI tool emphasizes data analysis since the BI tool is often a suite comprised of the feature of reporting, monitoring, analysis, and prediction. BI reporting tools are primarily for IT departments or report developers. They use bi reporting software to make reports that show you the past and current status. 

Complex reports such as electronic invoices, process sheets, receipts, etc. can also be conveniently generated by Reporting software. 

BI software is mainly for business departments and data analysts. The key to BI software is ‘data+business understanding.’ 

The ‘data’ part is the statistics and data display. 

‘Business understanding’ is realizing in-depth data analysis and smart data forecasting via analysis and prediction functions such as data mining, predictive modeling, and so on. It helps you understand why the statuses are the way they are and how to improve performance.

However, in making reports, BI software is weak in the richness of report styles, the diversity of charts, and the print function.

Take FineReport as an example. As a professional reporting tool, FineReport provides three types of reports

 to help you deal with any reporting demands: General Report, 

Aggregation Report and Dashboard. 

Besides, bi reporting tools have powerful export and print features that support export or print the reports into different formats such as Word, Excel, and PDF. These particular functions make BI reporting tools distinctive in reporting. 

4. How do BI Reporting Tools work?

Business Intelligence developers and report writers to use BI reporting tools to define data sources, visualize data, display formats, create parameters, queries, and so on.

For example, the server of FineReport is primarily used to read and parse the template created by the designer and convert the template into an HTML page. That way, users can view, modify, and print data through browsers such as IE and Firefox. Simultaneously, a robust caching mechanism and clustering mechanism are built-in, which supports extensive data volume calculations and concurrent processing of many users, and innovatively adopts flash technology, supporting zero-client accurate printing.

5. Top 10 Key Features of BI Reporting Tools in 2020

Based on the study of the evaluation criteria of Gartner Magic Quadrant for analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms, I have summarized the top 10 key features of BI reporting tools for your reference.

Overall, as users’ data sources become more extensive, their preferences for BI reporting are changing. They prefer self-service development, interactive dashboards, and self-service data exploration. To put it bluntly, users increasingly want to do their own data analysis without having to find support from the IT department.

5.1 Management, security, and architecture of the BI reporting platform

Good Business intelligence reporting tools can achieve platform security, manage platform users, monitor access and usage, optimize performance, support operation in different operating systems, and ensure the system’s high availability and disaster recovery.

As a part of enterprise informationization, there are many reasons for business intelligence software to do separate management and disaster recovery.

On the one hand, governments, Internet companies, and large enterprises attach great importance to informatization construction and require separate maintenance.

On the other hand, BI reporting systems have gradually become the support of business management decisions and play an increasing role. Enterprises require BI reporting systems to provide stable services throughout the day.

5.2 Metadata management

Users can centrally manage metadata, including searching, extracting, processing, storing, sharing metadata, and publishing metadata externally.

The metadata is focused on the dimensions, indicators, hierarchies, measures, and other data required for business analysis. It also includes some processed data, such as KPI, personal sales, single product sales, and other data. At the same time, the system supports administrators to associate and integrate metadata processed and stored by users with the underlying data connected to the BI reporting software.

5.3 Analytics dashboards

Create highly interactive dashboards and content with visual exploration operations and embedded advanced geospatial analysis.

The analytics dashboards can also be understood as interactive chart components, such as common bar charts, line charts, scatter plots, etc., as well as advanced rectangular tree charts, multi-layered donut charts, administrative geographic maps, and custom maps, heat maps, flow maps, and more. The main point here is that these charts should be built in the Business Intelligence reporting tool, and at the same time, it supports business staff to simply drag and drop to achieve chart display. From the time being, this trend is quite obvious.

5.4 Interactive visual exploration

Explore and analyze data with a series of common and special charts.

These conventional charts are mainly pie charts, line charts, etc., while special charts refer to special visual effects such as heat maps, flow maps, rectangular tree maps, and GIS geographic information maps. Of course, in addition to the richness and beauty of charts, you also need to pay attention to the interactive operation.

If you want to learn more about chart types, this article is for your reference: Top 16 Types of Chart in Data Visualization.

5.5 Support mobile display

Users can publish the analysis content of BI reporting tools to mobile terminal devices and can use the mobile device’s own functions to implement touch operations, photos, videos, positioning, etc. of BI pages.

Mobile reporting is a big bright spot in the BI market right now. Different companies have different needs. Some people pay attention to multiple operating systems, such as Android and IOS versions, which must be supported synchronously. Some people pay attention to functions and interaction effects, such as data collection, image and video collection, positioning, linkage, and drilling on mobile devices. However, please pay more attention to the security of mobile terminals, and mobile BI must ensure the security of corporate data.

5.6 Embed analysis content

Support the seamless integration of BI analysis pages into business processes or business systems, and support the direct creation and modification of analysis content in business software, and management of the BI reporting platform.

The seamless embedding of BI analysis content mainly considers several aspects. The first is to achieve single sign-on, which means that users do not have to log in to the business system, and then log in to the BI system again, and the system can automatically complete multi-platform authentication. The second is permission integration. The BI reporting platform must provide an integration solution that allows users to view BI analysis within the permission in the business software interface. The third is UI integration. As part of the components embedded in the business system, the BI reporting platform itself should have the ability to easily modify the UI so that the embedded BI interface is integrated into the business system.

5.7 Embedded advanced analytics

Users can easily use the advanced analysis functions built into the BI reporting tool, or they can import and integrate advanced analysis models developed externally.

In popular understanding, the BI reporting platform comes with an advanced analysis model and algorithm model, which allows users to drag data and automatically runs the model to reach a conclusion. Judging from the current BI product strategy on the market, most BI products have not yet supported embedded advanced analytics, and a few support integration with R language. A common scenario is that the user develops an algorithm model by himself or has accumulated advanced analysis models for many years, and then connects the data processed by the analysis model to a BI reporting system for visual analysis and display. That is, BI reporting tools are still for data analysis and graphical display.

5.8 Self-service data preparation

Users themselves drag and drop data from different sources to create analysis models, and then the system automatically processes the data through intelligent analysis and automatic correlation, including structured data and unstructured data.

Self-service data preparation is essentially letting the BI reporting system automatically handle the logical association between data. At present, it is difficult for many BI tools to achieve this, but the BI reporting tool like FineReport on the market have opened up new solutions. In addition to automatically associating and escaping data, you can also manually set the association. At the same time, after the IT staff initially processes the data, the business people can process the data again through the SPA spiral analysis function.

5.9 Publish and share analysis content

Allow users to publish and manipulate BI analysis content through various file output types and distribution methods.

Users can share the content and decision of BI analysis through BI reporting platform. In short, the BI analysis page I made can be shared with others, and I can also edit and modify the content shared by others, and we can communicate with each other. The biggest value here is the reuse of BI analysis. That is, the BI analysis data and conclusions that you have made can be shared, and your own analysis model can also be shared, to improve the collaboration efficiency of enterprise employees.

5.10 Ease of use and visualization

It is easy to manage and deploy business intelligence reporting software, create and share BI analysis, and easy to visualize data.

The professionalism and ease of use of BI reporting software are two aspects that are difficult to balance. The ease of use of BI reporting software must take into account the software operation level of the business staff and the acceptable training costs in this regard. I think ease of use is more about providing operational tips and easier interaction. However, the necessary training is still needed. After all, data analysis itself is a professional matter and requires corresponding skills.

6. Using FineReport to Implement BI Reporting

I collected a bi reporting tools list before. Today, I want to recommend FineReport, which is a professional BI reporting tool designed for the enterprise. 

6.1 Excel-like interface, no coding needed.

As mentioned above, most companies are still using Excel to implement the reporting system. And no matter the report developers or the business staff, they are accustomed to the Excel interface. Therefore, there is no doubt that an excel-like reporting tool is the best to promote digital transformation in the company.

6.2 Innovative Data Entry 

FineReport provides rich widgets that can make it easy to massive input data via forms into databases, with innovative functions such as data validation and temporary storage.

6.3 Powerful Decision-making Platform 

The web report portal for enterprise reporting provides a very secure environment for reports management, access controls, automatic report, and so on.

6.4 Easy Deployment and Integration

FineReport is a 100% JAVA software which can be seamlessly integrated with various systems via independent or embedded deployment. Therefore, you can show your reports in your existing business system such as ERP, CRM. 

6.5 Mobile BI Application

FineMobile supports business performance monitoring and data updating at any time and any places and on any mobile device. In this way, you can monitor the performance and make wise instant decisions.

6.6 Real-time Reporting

FineReport supports up-to-the-minute data reports when the related data updated in the business systems. The real-time report can be checked on the browser side and sent to the set email address once any change occurs.

FineReport is free for personal use, without user and features limits. You can download it for a free trial.