6 Time-Saving Management Reporting Techniques That Could Save You Hundreds Of Hours

“Our management reporting system isn’t up-to-date or anything, but it works pretty well for us…”

This is a story we’ve heard far too often from companies who are using outdated reporting methods (like Excel spreadsheets or PowerPoint presentations). But we’ve also heard some of those same companies follow that sentiment up with: “...but after examining our process more critically, we think it can be improved upon.”

If this sounds like you, the six tips below can help you save a great deal of time and see better outcomes. Putting them to work is as simple as switching to a more efficient management reporting system.

6 Time-Saving Management Reporting Techniques That Could Save You Hundreds Of Hours

1. Make bulk changes and edits with updated information.

If you’re using a static management reporting system like Excel, making bulk changes is impossible. If you want to update multiple items, you just have to rebuild the spreadsheet. But use management reporting software, and a few clicks will update all data appropriately.

Bulk updates also ensure that all measures are using the same changes. If you get interrupted half way through some edits in Excel, there is a chance that many of your measures will have the old evaluations and not the new ones.

2. Manage all report owners in one place.

If you’re in charge of report creation, you may be spending quite a bit of time chasing updates from report owners so you can update all pertinent data. This is frustrating and time-consuming. With management reporting software, you can easily see which report owners have updated their data and send out reminders to those who have not.

You can also receive automated notifications when information is updated and view an audit log of changes. This means you won’t have to spend time searching a variety of spreadsheets trying to identify what has changed.

Metropolitan Community College (MCC), Missouri’s oldest community college, used to collect updates from its 61 planning units as individual PDF reports. Tactics lived in Excel spreadsheets, any change meant redistributing forms to everyone, and administrators had to read every form by hand to assess goal achievement. In ClearPoint, color-coded fields showed each unit’s update timeline, and updates were completed within an hour instead of days.

3. Import all data sources to one place.

It is frustrating to go to meetings and have measure owners show up with different data from their own spreadsheets. But if you only use software (and printouts from the software), you won’t have this problem.

Using a tool like Data Loader in ClearPoint’s reporting software allows you to make sure all information is up-to-date with little effort and very low possibility of error. In fact, we have clients who are easily saving themselves two full days of work every month with this tool, which adds up to nearly a month every year they’re getting back.

Southern Ohio Medical Center (SOMC) had exactly this problem. Dedicated people populated Excel cells with data from across the hospital, then copied it into every duplicative place it needed to live for different teams. The work was extremely time-consuming and prone to human error. Automation features such as the Data Loader drastically reduced the time needed to populate data, and the system is now managed by two people in the performance improvement team.

4. Track action items that come out of meetings.

In many meetings, actions go on a whiteboard or flip chart, and once the meeting is over they’re erased from the board and your memory. If you spend valuable leadership time discussing your strategic future, you should ensure your action items are always captured at every strategy meeting. The right reporting software makes it simple to create action items, assign owners, and take action thereafter.

DC Thomson Media, one of the UK’s leading content creators, used to track action items in disconnected Excel documents, with limited visibility between monthly meetings. It then ran both departmental and Senior Operating Board meetings directly from ClearPoint, with interactive agendas, live KPI dashboards, real-time project updates and integrated action item tracking. That removed the need to jump between applications during meetings. Report preparation fell from 4 days to just 8 hours per month.

5. Be sure human error doesn’t mess up your reporting.

One of the biggest issues with adding data into your reports is the potential for data errors, version control issues, and formatting nightmares. For example, let’s say you’re involved in the strategic execution for a municipality and you’ve made a decision to invest more in public safety, but then you find out the choice was made based on a human error in calculation and the money could’ve been spent somewhere else. This happens more often than you might think. Great management reporting software reduces the possibility that a situation like this will occur. If it does occur, you can see the error, rectify it, and redirect your spending to higher value projects.

6. Push updated reporting information live to your website.

Pushing PDF reports or community dashboards directly to your website is critical if you’re involved in a municipality. But if you use Excel or a bare-bones reporting system, this process has to be done manually. With ClearPoint or another full-featured management reporting system, you can push any data you’d like live to your website at any time, which could save you hours.

We have many municipal customers that create a community dashboard relevant to their citizens with information that comes from their strategy management system. The overall process has all of their information, but only the most important parts are made public.

Publishing from the same record your staff work in changes the timing. As our public dashboard best practices put it, a measure updated on Tuesday is public on Tuesday. The catch is that an automated feed publishes whatever the record says, so a stale record becomes a stale public claim. Give every published measure an owner who keeps it current, and show a “Last updated” date on each one.

See how ClearPoint automates your strategy reporting — book a demo