How to automate your company’s reporting workflows

In business, we all love having insightful reporting dashboards at our fingertips. When done right, they show us where the business is thriving, areas where it’s struggling, and if we’re on track to meet our goals.

That said, creating reporting dashboards can be incredibly time consuming. It takes time and effort to collect up-to-date, accurate and meaningful data, not to mention the learning curve required to understand what data to collect and how to do it.

Therefore reporting is one of the most effective parts of your business to automate.

Plus, it doesn’t have to be complicated to implement automated reporting workflows.

Here’s how to automate your company’s reporting workflow for dashboards that are continuously updated, without going beyond setup.

The good, the bad, and the ugly of reporting workflows

So you know you want good data reporting in your company. But what does this actually look like?

Review the characteristics below and identify how your company’s data workflows are currently performing.

The good

You can identify the most effective reporting workflows by looking for:

• Clear tracking of key KPIs, without clutter and vanity stats
• An automated dashboard your team can view on any device
• Regularly updated data that requires no manual, time-consuming and error-prone import and export

The bad

Reporting workflows that need optimization and automation, on the other hand, look like this:

• Reports that depend on you (or someone else) to trigger updates
• A lack of assurance that the data in your business reports is correct
• Siled reports that only certain people can easily access

the ugly one

And this is what you should do Real Avoid if you want to save time, improve data accuracy and fix efficiency leaks:

• Manually import and export data between apps, or copy and paste data between worksheets and story slides
• Outdated or overly complex dashboards that offer no real value or lack clear data
• Knowing that the data on your dashboards is inaccurate

Our pick of the best options for automated reports

How can you achieve more of the good and less of the ugly in your reporting? Here are some of the best ways to automate your reporting and create insightful dashboards with the most relevant and current KPIs, ranked from simple to highly customizable:

• Built-in reporting for your CRM and key apps
• Google Analytics
• Google Sheets
• Google Data Studio
• Supermetrics

1. Built-in reporting for your CRM and key business apps

Many comprehensive CRM options on the market have excellent reporting capabilities. Some also have native integrations to pull data from other major apps.

For example, HubSpot connects to Google Analytics to enrich the data you already have in the CRM. This makes it easy to display website engagement analytics alongside lead and customer data.

As a simple solution for automated reporting, check the scope of your CRM to create up-to-date dashboards that share your company’s most important data.

Tip: For the most accurate and enriched data insights in your CRM, sync it in two ways with your other business apps that collect data.

2. Google Analytics – for an up-to-date overview of your website data

If you want to automate reporting on website engagement and conversion goals, Google Analytics provides a simple, yet robust framework.

To start, optimize the data you collect. Make sure the tracking code is correctly added to your website and look at the setup Events to track the conversions that are important to your business, such as e-commerce transactions or a visitor who lands on your sign-up confirmation page.

You can then add these key metrics to your dashboard as custom widgets and choose how they’re visualized. Of custom dashboards, you can customize your reporting for the best overview, taking into account the most important KPIs for your team.

It’s also worth creating a simple process to share or export your dashboard, for example with a link that anyone on your team can use without logging into Google Analytics. Or you can extend your automation even further by automating Slack notifications that share the GA dashboard on a weekly basis.

3. Google Sheets – for a simple spreadsheet powered by Google Analytics

Google Sheets is a very simple yet effective solution for automating your data reporting.

The main scope for automated reporting with Google Sheets is through: enable the Google Analytics add-on and automatically retrieve data.

Here’s an example of a report that’s easy to create in Google Sheets with Google Analytics data:

You can have your reports updated automatically (and avoid having to click “refresh” to get the new data from Google Analytics) by selecting Add-ons > Google Analytics > Schedule Reports from the menu bar.

Another great option for automated reports in Google Sheets is the Supermetrics integration with Google Sheets, which also allows you to link data from your non-Google business apps.

Tip: If you use Google Slides to present business meetings and reports, you can automatically sync charts and data views in Google Sheets with Slides (and Docs) to avoid manual copying and pasting before each meeting.

4. Google Data Studio – for highly customizable visualizations using data from multiple apps

Google Data Studio enables you to connect, visualize and share your business data on one platform. It’s pretty easy to set up, but there’s a ton of room for customization and complexity if that’s what you’re looking for. With the tool you can:

• Connect data from the apps you use every day through built-in and partner connectors. The 500+ datasets include built-in connections to Google products like Google Analytics, Sheets and Ads, plus partner connections to apps like Copper, Mailchimp or Facebook Ads.

• visualize your data in engaging ways with interactive reports, charts, and dashboards.

• Part your reports and dashboards and collaborate with individuals, teams or the world with public visibility. You can also embed your Data Studio reports on any web page.

To get started with Google Data Studio, first choose which data sources you want to link:

Then decide how you want to visualize and share your reports.

5. Supermetrics – for a scalable solution that takes Google Sheets, Excel or Google Data Studio further

Supermetrics is a scalable solution designed to bring all your marketing metrics together in one place, including PPC, SEO, social and web analytics.

You can use Supermetrics in addition to these tools to bring all your marketing data insights directly to any platform:

• Google Data Studio
• Google Sheets
• Excel

Here’s an example of a report with Supermetrics data in Google Sheets:

Best Practices for Automated Reporting

Regardless of the tools and processes you choose to automate your business reporting workflows, there are some best practices to consider to get the best results.

When creating your reporting automation, focus on these three goals:

• Simplicity: The most effective reporting workflows and dashboards are often the simplest. What is the most valuable data for your business to track? Keep the focus on a few KPIs and make sure the data is automatically updated, accurate and accessible.

• Accessibility: Avoid keeping your reporting in silos. Make sure your team members have easy access to the data they need to track performance and do their best work, such as with a public dashboard pinned to a Slack channel.

• Accuracy of the data: Even the best automated reporting workflow will fail if the data in your source apps is inaccurate. Take the time to clean up your databases and use an iPaaS to instantly sync data between your apps using conditional rules.