What Is Data Reporting and What Is It Used For?

For businesses looking to gain a competitive advantage, it's important to understand how to utilize your available data. Understanding data can help identify opportunities for growth and improvement and help you make informed decisions based on evidence that data provides. 

However, for data to be useful, you must first process it. This is where data reporting comes in. It enables you to present data in a simple way to understand, summarizing findings so that decision-makers and business leaders can utilize the information to create a path forward. 

Discover what data reporting is, why it is important, how to use specific data reporting tools, and learn the steps for writing your data report.

What is data reporting?

Data reporting refers to taking data and converting it into an understandable format. This practice allows you to collect information and determine what is happening within your organization, giving you an accurate read on day-to-day operations and performance indicators.

The purpose of reporting is to take data and transform it into usable information, but it doesn’t offer specific insight or suggestions as to what you should do with the data. Instead, data analytics is responsible for discovering the “why.”

You can present data reports in various formats, such as spreadsheets, charts, and graphs.

Difference between data reporting and data analytics

Data reporting seeks to provide context as to “what” is happening, whereas data analytics focuses on “why” it is happening. With data reporting, you need to organize and summarize the data. However, with analytics, you are examining the data to find the right questions to ask, conclude, and use the analytics to make decisions. Although data analytics goes further than reporting to understand the data, both play an essential role. Additionally, analytics relies upon proper data reporting to come to accurate conclusions.

Read more: What Is Data Analysis? (With Examples)

What are the benefits of data reporting?

Performing regular data reporting can allow you to measure specific metrics, track your progress over time, and monitor the performance of your business or organization. In addition, data reporting takes information that’s often difficult to process and presents it in a manner that’s easy to understand, making information more accessible and allowing you to notice trends that can help you comprehend your business status and drive business growth in the future.

Types of data reports

You can use data reports to help you within many areas of your business. Check out a few different types of data reports that you may see organizations implement:

• Financial reports: A financial report allows you to examine your company's current financial state in specific areas, such as earnings and profits. Financial reports often give quarterly breakdowns of revenue or profit to give businesses an idea of the money spent and earned month by month, allowing them to adjust for the future.

• Growth reports: Growth reports communicate how your company projects to grow in the future. You can also compare your growth projections with your competitors to understand your positioning and adapt your goals accordingly. 

• Revenue reports: Revenue reports include crucial financial information that gives you an idea of how much you can afford to spend. Revenue reports can include customer profit, business loans, or investor cash flow to track your total capital. 

• Expense reports: Expense reports help monitor your company's spending. They allow you to keep track of all your expenses and ensure that money is being spent appropriately in ways that benefit the business. 

• Customer analytics reports: This reporting type empowers you to understand your customers better. You can learn how they interact with a product, what improvements you can make, and what your customer demographics look like.

• Research reports: If you have a specific question you’re looking to answer, you can utilize research reports to address that question and make the right business decision, such as determining the ideal time to release a product to the market. 

Who uses data reporting?

Data reporting is valuable for several industries, including banking, health care, finance, and government. From creating financial reports to collecting data on patients in health care systems, data reporting helps organizations compile and share the data they’ve gathered in an understandable and easy-to-read format. With data reports, these industries and organizations can make informed decisions and understand how well their business models meet their goals.

Read more: What Does a Data Analyst Do? Your Career Guide

How to write a data report

When writing a data report, you must first consider who you’re reporting to, the type of data you’re reporting, and where you’re sourcing it from. After establishing this, you’re ready to move on to writing your report. Follow these steps:

1. Define your goal.

Before you start implementing your report, you need to define its purpose. Who is your audience? What metrics are you hoping to discover, measure, or reveal? What questions are you trying to answer? Figuring out your goals can help you choose the best reporting format for your needs.

2. Select the format.

Depending on the data type you’re reporting and your goals, specific formats will be better than others. Determine whether you should represent the data in a visual report using charts and graphs or if it makes more sense to report the data using tables in a spreadsheet to list the data. 

3. Compile data and build the report.

Using the available data, ensure that your data is complete and consistent so that it’s ready to use in the report. Use multiple reliable sources when building your report. Using your selected format, present the data in an organized way so that the information is easy to understand and visually appealing.

4. Review the report.

Ensure that all the data in the report is accurate, easy to understand, and focused on relevant information. In this stage, getting feedback from team members or stakeholders can be helpful, allowing them to ask questions and make significant revisions. After the review stage, your report will be published and shared with others.

Data reporting tools

Using tools that help automate the process can make data reporting easier. Some of the best data reporting tools and software you can use to create reports include the following:

• Tableau: Tableau lets you visually report data with analytics features and interactive reports. It requires no previous experience with coding, making it an excellent beginner-friendly tool. 

• Quickbooks: Quickbooks is effective for reporting important financial information and tracking transactions. It uses customized reports and templates highlighting vendors, inventory, pricing, and more.

• Datapine: When working with complex or multiple databases, Datapine effectively manages data from several sources, allowing you to track key performance indicators.

• Power BI: Another visualization tool, PowerBI can process large quantities of data from several sources and is a good fit for larger and growing organizations.

• Zoho Analytics: Zoho Analytics helps you transform business data into reports while also offering features that emphasize data integration, visual analysis, data storytelling, and collaborative analytics.

• Whatagraph: Receiving data from several channels, Whatagraph can create visual reports and effectively track metrics from your social media accounts, email, SEO, and more.

• Hive: Hive provides up-to-date tracking you can access from anywhere using the cloud. It integrates well with other software and optimizes project management data reporting. 

Read more: 10 Data Analysis Tools and When to Use Them

Getting started with Coursera

Data reporting is a critical step when working with data. Excellent data reporting explains “what” is happening, passing the question to data analytics to find out “why.” You’ll find a range of tools available to support your data reporting efforts. 

Continue learning about data on Coursera. For example, consider completing the Data Visualization With Tableau Specialization offered by the University of California, Davis to learn more about data reporting. This course teaches you how to create powerful business intelligence reports and data visualizations. You can also take the Introduction to Data Analytics course offered by IBM to learn more about the steps of the data analysis process and data visualization.