How to Create Automated Reports

Automated reports are often needed in the business world. In any business, the underlying business data is constantly changing as new products are sold, payments are received and new employees are hired. To enable managers to make informed decisions, business intelligence reports need to be available with data that is as current as possible. Additionally, with the business units spread across continents, automating the reporting process is even more important.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

Things You’ll Need:

• Reporting software with automation features
• Distribution list
• Trial run
• System logs

1. Speak with the end users, typically decision-making managers and executives, to determine the reports you need to create. Discuss exact information needed in those reports and the frequency and times when the reports need to be automatically generated.
2. Investigate the features of your in-house reporting software. Not all reporting software products have the capability to generate automated reports. For some, that feature may not be active in your copy, depending on the version of the product and licensing
3. Ensure that the automated reporting feature is available and active. Depending on the software, you might have to start up a service on the server to make the feature active. Check the user guide of the reporting software to understand how to do it. The automatic reporting feature may also be a separate tool that needs to be run to generate reports. The time when such external tools are run may have to be controlled through scheduler events. Read the instructions for your operating system to figure out how to set up a scheduling job.
4. Create the reports, and confirm with all the users that the layout and information is exactly what they wanted.
5. Create a distribution list for each report and use the built-in feature of your reporting software to define the distribution list. This is a list of email addresses to which the report will be sent each time it's generated.
6. Make sure the external scheduler is set up, if one is required.
7. Conduct a trial run, by specifying a report generation time a few hours after you initially set up the software. That way, you can ensure that the reports are being created correctly and distributed to everyone on the list.
8. Check that the right report was generated using the most current data and that the report was delivered to all the intended recipients after the scheduled time of the test run. Once confirmed, remove the test schedule from the automated system and let it go live.
9. Check your system logs every few days to identify any errors that might otherwise be going unnoticed.

Tips & Warnings

• Even though automated reports are a great way to generate reports, indiscriminate use of this feature will unnecessarily put pressure on your server and network. Make sure that the reports really need to be automated and that everyone on the distribution list really needs to receive the reports.

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