Management reporting is common and to some extent indispensable in enterprise reporting. These are very useful as they provide corporate leaders with accurate data and detailed management conditions, which helps them make smarter decisions and adjust strategies. In this article, we’re going to introduce the what, why, and how of successful management reporting and provide solutions for you. After reading the whole passage, you’ll make it clear what essential practices contribute to a clear management report.

What is Management Reporting?

Actually, management reporting is information given to the company’s decision-makers to inform them of the business performance. It does not have a fixed format, you can include relevant elements based on the management demand of your company, so it varies from business to business. However, in general, management reporting usually covers financial and operational performance like budget, cash flow, staff productivity, project profitability, and so on. These data could reflect and track the key performance indicators of the segmented departments and staff. The officers could make judgments of the overall situation of different departments and make data-driven decisions.

Successful management reporting is supposed to present all the necessary information in an understandable and clear way.

Why You Need Management Reporting?

Management reporting provides detailed and valuable information that can help your business grow and optimize. In the management reporting, leaders could know each segmentation’s performance clearly. Through the solid data, they could discover the problems in time and make instant adjustments. Also, they could improve and enhance communication among colleagues according to the reporting. Without management reporting, the leaders have to search target information from different reports like human resource reporting, financial reporting, and so on, which is time-wasting and inefficiency. In addition, they would lack the necessary indicators to help judge the business’s overall performance. While to the employees, management reporting indicates their individual performance to their leader. It looks like a supervision mechanism and could boost their engagement, inspiration, and motivation.

The ultimate goal of management reporting is to help decision-makers grasp the business’s situation and make necessary adjustments in time. On the one hand, it helps prevent potential problems, both the business and employees. On the other, it’s a good helper in optimizing the company.

How to Write Management Reporting?

A successful management reporting should cover all the necessary information and present them in a clear and understandable way. Before starting to make a management reporting, you should know clearly what indicators your boss wants to see and make a list of them. Then, you should range them in a logical way. After that, you could start to design the reporting and present the data. Here we list some key factors you should take notice of when designing the report.

Key Factors of Successful Management Reporting

• Make the objectives, key results and KPIs clear to the target audience: in usual, there’re more than 1 leaders in the business and they take charge of different departments, so you should choose the targeted indicators and data to the different leader and make sure you’re showing what they want to know.
• Master data visualization skills and make good use of charts: data visualization is a good way to show your data clearly, the leader could feel the wave of the data, master the situation and make corresponding strategies. Making good use of charts could make your management reporting more professional and understandable.
• Provide real-time data: real-time data that aligns with the indicators you show is very important. Under normal conditions, you need enough time to make your reporting and this will lead to a time gap when the leader gets the data, which is likely to cause some misleadings and affect his judgment on the real situation. So the best solution is to provide your leader with real-time data to avoid the information gap.
• Taking care of the mobile reporting presentation effect: you should be aware that leaders are usually busy on their business trip, so that will be excellent if you could present your reporting on their mobile phone, enabling them to find problems anytime and anywhere, and exert management pressures, to promote the business.

Management Reporting With FineReport

FineReport is an easy-to-use reporting software. We believe everyone could make impressive reports and dashboards. We offer solutions for management reporting. With FineReport, it is easy to approach.

• Fast data integration from multiple sources: FineReport supports all mainstream databases. Users can combine data from multiple data sources and enterprise systems with just one click and use these data to comprehensive analyses. Also, FineReport will provide you with the real-time data, you don’t need to worry about the information gap.
• Cool data visualization: FineReport provides 19 categories and over 50 styles of self-developed HTML5 charts with cool 3D and dynamic interactive effects, which could give you powerful visual experience.

• Convenient mobile BI application: FineReport has a matched mobile app named FineMobile. FineMobile supports business performance monitoring and data updating at any time any place and on any mobile device. Readers could annotate with comments on mobile.

If you are interested, just download FineReport and have a free trial.