Reporting Tools & Software: The 5 Most Crucial Aspects (& 9 Popular Tools)

Most organizations begin their management reporting process in Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint. They usually don’t consider alternatives until their reporting becomes too large or complex. Then they look at new tools and often find that the reports they need require a dedicated reporting tool.

Companies looking for reporting software need a solution that can handle five major components:

• Structure
• Reports
• Data integration
• Customization
• Customer Support

Below, we describe what each component involves and why you should weigh all five as you choose a reporting tool.

5 Crucial Aspects Of Data Reporting Software

1. Structure

Your organizational structure is unique, and it shapes how you organize, manage, and measure goals. You may measure at the strategic level, with items such as revenue growth or client acquisition. You may measure at the project level, with items like actual cost and planned vs. earned value. You may do both. Your reporting tool must let you track and report either way.

Also consider these structural elements to decide how much your reporting tool needs to handle:

• Departments vs. themes—Is your company organized in a more traditional manner, such as by department? Or does it heavily embrace collaboration and organize around cross-functional themes?
• Goals vs. objectives—Do you use these two terms interchangeably, or is one subordinate to the other? In other words, you may have a goal with multiple objectives or maybe just a set of key goals. Either way, be clear on how your organization uses these terms before choosing reporting software.
• Projects alignment—How much do you rely on projects within your organization? How closely linked are those projects to your overall strategy? How closely do you track elements of those projects?

Make sure the reporting tool you choose can handle the structure of your strategy. Before you fall for beautiful screenshots, check that the solution does what you need, not what looks cool.

2. Reports

Accurate report generation requires you to know your audience. You likely have a large amount of insightful data, but not everyone needs (or wants) to see all of it. For example, your management team, executive team, and board of directors will all be looking for different levels of data.

Decide which formats and security measures your reports need. Nearly every organization uses PDF, but you may also need HTML or even printed reports. You may also need your reports to be ADA compliant.

Aside from meeting specific requirements, you want your reports to have a professional look and feel. And you need to be able to generate the same report consistently with each reporting period.

When you evaluate reporting tools, check that you can create a high-level report with useful overview information and status indicators, as well as a detailed report with 12 months of data, detailed analysis, and project Gantt charts. After that first set, you should be able to create the remaining monthly reports from the same underlying data with just a few clicks.

See how ClearPoint automates your strategy reporting — book a demo

3. Data Integration

Preparing a single report can take upwards of 40 hours. The time it takes to gather, analyze, and format data from across the organization adds up to more than most managers expect.

Think about the 10 different people you have to email 2-3 times, sometimes even stopping by their desk. Each of them has to find and send their information, and your team has to massage it to fit the charts. Then you double-check the data and prepare for last-minute entries and revisions.

A reporting tool that integrates data from different systems and people speeds up the reporting process. The right tool can:

• Integrate data automatically, every reporting period.
• Produce more visually compelling reports than a traditional option like Excel.
• Merge qualitative and quantitative information with ease.
• Calculate, aggregate, and evaluate data consistently.
• Operate on a schedule, but still allow for ad-hoc needs.

4. Customization

Reporting tools should let you report the way you want. A tool that forces a one-size-fits-all approach will be of limited use.

Your reporting software should feel like part of your organization. It should let you tailor the colors, layout, tables, and other design elements to your branding. You should also be able to create custom fields, such as order number, staff IDs, or internal notes, and manage layout exceptions for unique or one-off reporting situations.

Say you decide tomorrow to prioritize your initiatives. You should be able to add a field called “Priority,” insert that field into detailed pages and summary reports, filter on the priority, and schedule reports to go out each month on top priority projects that are off track. This should be a built-in feature that takes a few minutes to use. If it isn’t, don’t count on it being added later. Good tools handle common needs from the start.

5. Customer Support

Software is an investment and a partnership. The vendor you choose matters as much as the product. Any good data reporting software should come with three things:

• Excellent customer service—The vendor is easy to reach when you have a question, and their customer service team knows the product well enough to resolve (most!) issues.
• An extensive knowledge base—Many people prefer to troubleshoot on their own, so the vendor keeps support resources online, with answers to frequently asked questions and how-to articles for common problems.
• A clear dedication to quality—The vendor regularly solicits customer feedback and makes deliberate efforts to improve the product.

Expect your software provider to guide you through implementation and to stay available for the long haul whenever you have a question. To dig deeper into vendors, talk to some existing customers. If both the software and the vendor get high marks, you’re likely to make a sound investment that will serve your company well.

9 Of The Best Reporting Tools On The Market Today

Below are nine data reporting tools that are popular on the market today. Use this list as a starting point for your own research. The tools differ in emphasis and in how much technical expertise they require.

1. ClearPoint

ClearPoint is performance management software that helps manage and track your strategic plan. ClearPoint lets you create reports that show links between your projects and your goals, so your organization can see how your strategy and its components fit together. You can customize reports to include the fields you choose and match your organization’s branding and colors. Built-in automation tools also cut the time you spend on reporting. ClearPoint is capable of automatically:

• Uploading data from various spreadsheets and databases
• Sending update reminders to relevant employees
• Performing calculations and evaluations on progress
• Building reports for different audiences
• Distributing reports on a predetermined schedule

ClearPoint’s customer service also gets high marks from users: In 2020, the average response time to customer requests was 2 minutes and 49 seconds; it was also recognized for a Stevie Award for Customer Service Department of the Year.

2. SAP Crystal Reports

Crystal Reports is a popular report-writing tool that wins high marks in the data integration and customizations categories. It can access data from virtually any data source and present it in a variety of formats. Crystal offers a nearly unlimited number of options for sorting, compressing, and arranging data; it also features what it refers to as “interactive reporting,” where users can drill down, sort, highlight, filter, and search data presented on any report.

Built for small to medium-sized businesses, Crystal is commonly used for sales reports, financial statements, and income and revenue reports. Reports can be distributed via multiple channels, including email, PDF, the web, or an integration with an existing enterprise system. One caveat: Some users note the steep learning curve required to get up and running.

3. Jaspersoft Reporting

Jaspersoft bills itself as “the most flexible, customizable, and developer-friendly business intelligence platform in the world.” An open source Java reporting tool, Jaspersoft embedded analytics and reporting software is designed for software builders: people developing applications who want to build reporting into their product. Reports can be rendered with animated charts and graphs, viewed either in print or online, and exported in a variety of formats including PDF, HTML, Microsoft Excel, RTF, ODT, CSV, or XML files. Jaspersoft is highly rated by Java developers for functionality and customer support.

4. Zoho Analytics

If you’re looking for a visualization tool that can retrieve, analyze, and report on a variety of data relevant to your company’s health and operations, Zoho Analytics is a good choice. It uses a “spreadsheet-like” interface for data collection and analysis, and lets users build many dashboard configurations by drag and drop. Its custom reporting options let you track and visualize the metrics that matter to you. Reports and dashboards can be emailed, exported, printed, or embedded on websites and within blogs and apps.

Automation is a key feature of Zoho Analytics. After it collects your data and checks it for errors, gaps, and other issues, it can generate reports automatically, without a single query. The website includes a fairly extensive collection of tutorials and customer support documents to help resolve questions and get ideas from other users.

5. Microsoft Office Suite

Microsoft’s Excel and PowerPoint are staple software tools that are typically used together to produce reports. Excel is used by millions of people and organizations to collect, sort, calculate, and share data, including financial information, performance metrics, project plan progress, and more. PowerPoint can enhance the appearance of your reports with data mined from Excel.

These tools are good entry points for reporting and analytics, but they were built for simple data entry and analysis. As the amount of data you’re collecting grows, you’re better off switching to a more modern reporting tool for greater simplicity and professionalism, and easier sharing as well.

Note that the full Office suite consists of a word processor, spreadsheet editor, presentation program, note taking program, personal information manager, file hosting service, communication platform, desktop publisher, and a database management system.

6. Oracle Hyperion Interactive Reporting

Part of the Oracle Business Intelligence software suite, Hyperion Interactive Reporting is an all-in-one query, data analysis, and reporting tool for executives, business users, and analysts. Users can quickly get answers to business questions by creating queries and running them on demand to create formal reports. You don’t need to know SQL or any other query language. You build queries by choosing the data to retrieve from a visual representation of the database. Results can be displayed in table-style format or charts, and organized into reports with drill-down features. Hyperion is extremely flexible and provides analysts with the ability to quickly analyze data and produce deliverables, but more advanced-level tasks will require basic programming knowledge.

7. IBM Cognos Analytics

Artificial intelligence (AI) features prominently in IBM Cognos Analytics, a business intelligence platform that allows you to tap a wide variety of data sources for insights about your company. Users can ask an AI Assistant questions about their data in natural language, and it produces visualizations in response. The official site notes that artificial intelligence can help you find hidden relationships among your data, as well as forecast trends over time. Best for mid-market and large organizations, IBM Cognos Analytics works well for those who have a good grasp of their organization’s underlying data and data sources.

8. Microsoft Power BI Report Server

Power BI Report Server is an on-premises reporting solution with a web portal in which users can display and manage reports created in Power BI. Your users can access those reports in different ways: by viewing them in a web browser, mobile device, or email. The Report Server web portal is where you manage reports: you can organize them, create “subscriptions” that roll out reports to specific recipients, link reports, repurpose them, and more. Microsoft’s Power BI product earns high marks for usability and visualization.

9. Telerik Reporting

This reporting solution takes a “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) design approach. You can create and edit report features fairly simply, using gridlines, item snapping, rotation, and on-canvas item dimension changes for positioning and aligning. Reports can be directly embedded into any .NET desktop and web application, and exported in more than 15 formats, including Word, Excel, PDF, PPT, CSV, and more. While some users note that the tool requires a bit of time and practice to master, they also say that Telerik provides excellent customer support and thorough online documentation.

For simple, efficient, strategy management reporting, try ClearPoint.

We built ClearPoint with these five aspects in mind. The result is a fully customizable reporting solution that works in hundreds of industries. We believe reporting software should support the way you manage, not the other way around.