Business Report Automation
Summary
DRY (do not repeat yourself) is a principle in software development that aims to reduce redundancy in code. You do not need to be a software developer to apply this idea to your work. One of the biggest time drains for any business is reporting. You find yourself repeating the same tasks daily, weekly, monthly etc. This is a prime example were you need to use the DRY principle.
Does this sound like you? I spend time copying and pasting data in excel or google sheets. I use the data to build reports and send them to a myriad of stakeholders. If any of these painstaking tasks sound like you, then you need automation. This article will detail the benefits of automation, a calculation of your savings from automation, and some examples of implementing automation.
Benefits of Automation
Save Time
The single biggest benefit of report automation is allowing you to save time. Automation removes you from the painstaking task of manual updates. You no longer will spend hours a day going from Google Ads to Facebook to Seller Central pulling your numbers and pasting them into your report.
Eliminate Errors
Manual updates are mind numbing and mistakes are common. These mistakes can give you incorrect information to make your business decisions. If you were to enter in 100 orders instead of 10 orders you would incorrectly assume that your marketing campaign is performing better than it actually is. Errors cause you to burn money on ineffective actions. On top of the waste of money, you will burn hours identifying the problem by manually combing through each record.
Better Decision Making
Automation allows you to start your day by consuming the data and making decisions, rather than dealing with the painstaking and time-consuming task of creating the report. You are able to spend more time formulating the best course of action to increase profit. The elimination of manual errors enables you to keep your finger on the pulse, and spend your resources where it actually matters.
Combine Data to Reveal Insights
When proper automation is setup you can see a combination of your data sources in one place. An example would be knowing how much you are spending on your marketing budgets in any given day. You would need to go into Facebook Ads, Google Ads, etc. to pull the data individually. Then you may combine the data by day. With automation you can create complex rules that combine this data in one fell swoop. Let’s say you have retargeting campaigns that you want to group together on a weekly interval. Automation can handle this without you needing to touch anything.
These four benefits culminate into the over arching theme of moving you away from being a data aggregator into doing valuable tasks that can grow and optimize your business.
Calculating Savings
I built the below calculator to help you understand how much you could be saving using automation with a current process. You can adjust the time per week and the dollar amount that your time is worth. The breakeven is calculated by assuming the automation project delivers a 10x ROI. An example would be if your total cost in a year is $200 the project cost is assumed to be $20. We often return 10x ROI or better by implementing automation for our clients, check it out in our case studies. This is not intended to be a project estimate.
How to Automate
Automation is most easily implemented using business intelligence software. There are a variety of full stack and do it yourself solutions available for report automation. Capitol Data Analytics uses Tableau and R as the main software tools in report automation. Tableau specifically can be used to setup fully automated reporting. Tableau’s features include a wide range of data connectors (Google Analytics, Google Sheets, Maketo, and Salesforce are a few examples), automated data cleaning, cloud hosted options, automatic report updates, and automated emails for reports and alerts.
You can read more about Tableau being used to create an automated reporting system by reading Two Ten’s case study. CDA saves Two Ten 40 hours a month on their weekly reporting process. This amounted to an 8x ROI.
You can also read about how CDA used automated reporting to help Maytronics measure the impact of their marketing on sales. Read the case study here. This project had a 20X ROI and lead to a significant increase in Maytronics’ business.
Conclusion
The DRY principle is a powerful one that can be applied to your business intelligence. Automated reporting is one of the quickest ways to unlock value in your business by giving you more time to focus on activities that add revenue to your business. Two Ten and Maytronics benefited greatly from such automation.If you want to reap the benefits of automation but are unsure of how to implement it. CDA can implement a system that will return 10X the cost of the project.