Business Intelligence (BI) Reporting: A Comprehensive Guide

Irrespective of their size and scale of operation, organizations collect enormous amounts of data. As much as it is important to collect data, transforming it into actionable insights is equally important.

BI reporting tools help organize the data in the form of reports and present them as dashboards to drive meaningful business decisions eventually. Studies show that businesses that use intelligence tools are 5 times more likely to make quicker decisions than those that do not.

The development of business intelligence software solutions has simplified analyzing data reporting, which once remained a daunting task. In this blog, we have outlined the types and benefits of business intelligence reports and intricate details about the features, pros, and cons of the best business intelligence tools and software.

What Is BI Reporting?

The data collected by businesses is unorganized in their original, raw format. It must be organized and engineered to be able to use it effectively. In an organized format, the data can drive business efficiency, productivity, revenue, customer satisfaction, profits, etc. 

Business Intelligence reporting involves collecting and analyzing data using modern tools and software systems. Using BI tools, businesses can turn unorganized data into insightful statistics. The statistics can be presented in a visually appealing format like the dashboards. These statistics help businesses make informed decisions. 

Types of Business Intelligence Reports

BI reporting takes different approaches to collecting, tracking, and displaying data. There are different types of business intelligence reports, and you should choose based on the objective of a business, the specific needs of the use case, and the skills, competencies, and goals. 

Following are some of the common types of BI reporting. 

1. Self-service BI

Though data plays an integral role in empowering businesses with real-time insights, analyzing large volumes of data remains a cumbersome process.

The best way to promote business intelligence is to involve every stakeholder. Self-service BI encompasses the tools and software systems that help everyone, including those that may not have the technical skills and expertise to collect data and build custom dashboards. 

Self-service BI reporting tools help users organize the data and prepare reports without writing complex codes. Irrespective of the technical skills and competencies of the user, all the stakeholders in the organization, irrespective of their educational background and professional experience, get to prepare usable reports and generate quick insights from the data.

2. BI Reporting Dashboards

More than 90% of the information sent to the brain is in a visual format, and the brain can process visuals 60,000 times faster than text and other information formats.

With their interactive visualization abilities, dashboards help consolidate the data onto a single screen and identify trends and patterns in the data. The dashboard can be customized to include KPIs and metrics crucial to that specific business.

BI reporting dashboards have gained prominence owing to their ability to present in a visually appealing format and offer meaningful insights. Most of the dashboards can be generated using templates. The drag-and-drop abilities help build dashboards in a matter of minutes. 

3. Embedded BI Reports

Embedded BI is the process of integrating self-service BI into a business’s applications, portals, and websites. When you do so, business stakeholders can access data without switching over to a third-party website or application. Embedded BI reports bring data a step closer to the stakeholders, who can, in turn, use it to make informed decisions.

As embedded BI reports are integrated within an application, the features and functionalities can be customized based on the specific needs of a business. The embedded BI reports are a white-labeled solution, so the look and feel of the reports can be customized to align with the branding ideology of the business. Doing so promotes consistency and a cohesive user experience.

4. Static BI

As the name suggests, static BI presents data in a fixed, non-interactive format. The data and visual reports cannot be calibrated to meet the specific needs of business users. Static BI reports contain tables, charts, and graphs at the aggregated level.

Static BI generally presents a summary of the information collected or a snapshot of specific KPIs or business metrics. You can also use the static BI to present the data collected periodically, say daily, weekly, or monthly to other stakeholders and key decision-makers. You can use such reports to lead discussions with clients, investors, etc.  

5. Mobile BI

Mobile BI helps view the static dashboard and report on mobile devices, and this has gained prominence with an increase in smartphone penetration and remote work. Mobile BI helps stakeholders access real-time data and information on mobile phones even when not at their desks, so they respond quickly to changing business requirements. 

Why Do You Need BI Reporting Tools?

BI reporting has become a must-have for businesses as it helps collect data and generate crucial insights. Following are some reasons businesses need BI reporting tools and systems.

1. Gain a Competitive Advantage

BI tools help businesses monitor historical trends and evolving patterns in just a few clicks. Doing so helps them spot opportunities way ahead of others. Also, the insights from the BI reporting tools can enhance customer loyalty, employee performance, etc. All these help businesses gain an edge in the competitive business landscape.

2. Mitigate The Risk of Unknowns

As BI reporting tools help businesses gain access to real-time data and insights, it promotes data-driven decision-making. Doing so mitigates the uncertainties in business decisions and helps businesses make impactful decisions.

3. Performance Monitoring

Businesses can pick KPIs and metrics relevant to the business and create custom dashboards and reports.  These indicators help compare the business performance against predetermined goals and targets. This way, businesses can spot the gaps and identify the need for improvement in specific business areas.

4. Derive Customer Insights

Customer satisfaction is a major determinant of business success. The data and analytics derived from BI reports can be used to analyze customer behavior and personalize customer interaction and experience. These insights help promote customer loyalty and retention.

5. Cost Optimization

The insights generated from BI reports help businesses to track their earnings and expenses. Doing so helps businesses identify leakage and get rid of unnecessary costs. BI tools promote efficient allocation of resources, and so help optimize the cost and profit margins.

6. Enhances The Pace of Workflow

An enterprise collects data from several sources, which takes a long process. The insights generated through manual analysis may not be accurate. BI reporting helps businesses automate collecting data from multiple sources and provides a single access point to all users. Doing so enhances the speed of workflow and decision-making.

Benefits of Business Intelligence Reporting

By providing reliable data on time and easy-to-understand format, BI reporting provides several insights to businesses. In the following section, we have covered the key benefits of business intelligence reporting.

1. Enhances The Quality of Data

One of the notable advantages of using business intelligence reporting tools is that they help collect data until the last mile and generate deeper insights.

This is more important in this digital era, where data is generated everywhere. BI reporting tools help collect and process an enormous amount of data and generate quicker insights. As the data collection is automated, it eliminates the room for errors, bias, and prejudice.

2. Streamlines Data and Reporting Flow

BI reporting tools help streamline business data gathered from various sources. As the data and reports are centralized, BI reporting enhances the speed of decision-making and data analysis.  

3. Access to Reliable Business Information

BI reporting tools help businesses gain access to reliable, real-time information. When businesses decide on the data, they tend to be impactful and more accurate than the guesswork.  

4. Used in Multiple Departments

BI dashboards and reports can generate insights into data collected by different departments inside an organization. For example, it can be customized to cover 

• Sales metrics like targets, weekly sales revenue, customer lifetime value, customer acquisition cost, etc. 
• Finance-related metrics like return on assets, working capital ratio, return on equity, debt-equity ratio, etc. 
• Logistic analytics include shipment weight, tracking, returns, order accuracy, lead time, capacity utilization, etc. 

In large-scale businesses, the metrics on the dashboard can be customized based on the different departments. Doing so helps drive the productivity of different departments and the overall business efficiency. 

5. Real-time and Historical Data

BI reporting gathers both historical and real-time data and deliver sophisticated insights. It is impossible to analyze such vast amounts of data using traditional tools. Also, conventional tools rely on historical data to make decisions, as they can’t capture and process vast amounts of real-time data. As business intelligence reporting tools use historical and real-time data, they help make more accurate decisions based on the evolving needs of the business and rule out the bias in the data.

6. Predictive Analytics

Beyond collecting and tracking data, BI reporting tools make forecasts and estimations based on predictive analytics. These forecasts are made from data collected from multiple sources and are more accurate. These estimations drive informed business decisions and mitigate the risk of unknowns. 

Though predictive analytics is generally used to forecast future outcomes, it can also be used to analyze and determine the cause of past events. 

7. Informed Decision-making

With more power comes more responsibilities. Whether you are a CEO or a team leader, you may be expected to make decisions at different times. More importantly, these decisions will have a pronounced impact on the business outcomes. So, it is important to place such decisions on relevant data and analytics. 

BI reports have huge volumes of data and let you analyze and spot patterns, trends, and changes. Such insights help drive informed business decisions. Moreover, the BI reporting tools can be customized per a business’s specific requirements, and this, in turn, enhances the accuracy of decision-making.

8. Streamline Business Operations

As BI reports contain data in an organized format, it is easy to spot trends and patterns, which is more important in businesses with many inventories. If you run a business with a rapid turnover of products and services, using BI reports can streamline your procurement processes.

You can customize the BI dashboard to cover important procurement metrics like the number of suppliers, turnaround time, compliance, payment cycle, etc. Based on the data, the procurement team can make important decisions on inventory and purchases. 

9. Customer Behavior Analysis

The ultimate focus of every business is customer satisfaction. Customers can access wider brands today, so the competition is more intense than ever. They choose brands that align with their values and emotional needs. 

BI-based reporting tools can read customer emotions based on interactions and help build a holistic picture of customer behavior and requirements. This helps businesses customize their sales strategy and marketing campaigns per customer behavior and expectations.

10. Increases Accessibility of Data 

Data in its original format is unorganized, and it may require considerable technical expertise to be able to derive insights from the same.

BI reporting tools help convert complex data into a visually appealing format so that even those with limited technical expertise can perceive the data and related insights. This democratizes the availability and utilization of data across different departments in an organization. 

When all the employees and teams base their decisions and activities on data, it will likely enhance the productivity and efficiency of the whole organizational functioning. 

Top BI Reporting Practices

Businesses follow different BI reporting practices based on their business needs, objectives, and the nature of their operations. We have outlined some of the best BI reporting practices in the coming section, so you can also try them in your business.

1. Be Scalable

As much as it is important to keep your BI reporting simple, you must also ensure the scalability of such tools. You must watch out for the evolving business requirements and update your template and technical intricacies. Whenever you need a new metric, feature, or functionality, scale the reporting accordingly. You must keep validating the BI reporting with the requirements of the business landscape and sort out the gaps.

2. Control Your Data

While building BI reporting competencies, ensure you have a proper hold over the data sources and software tools used in the process. No matter whether you are analyzing the data or processing the information, ensure that they are in alignment with the insights expected out of them. 

3. Be Adaptable

Today’s business world is rapidly evolving. So, you must update your BI reporting capabilities to match the requirements of the evolving business landscape. While building the tools, ensure they adapt to different business requirements. 

4. Promote Data Literacy

While building the BI reporting abilities, leverage the skills and competencies of your team. Some steps may require more technical skills and expertise, while others do not. So, it is important to understand and determine what each employee needs to know and promote a culture of data literacy in your team. The data and analytics should help drive the business objectives and goals. 

How to Create Efficient BI Reports?

As we have discussed the best BI reporting practices in the previous section, here we outline some tips and tricks to build efficient BI reports.

1. Translate Needs into Data

The most important step in building BI reporting is mapping the business needs into data. Before you build the tool, identify the project’s goals, objectives, and scope. You must work on building a viable governance framework. Doing so ensures a deeper alignment between the reporting and business goals. 

2. Focus on Usability 

An important purpose of the BI reporting tools is to cater to the data and analytical requirements of the internal and external business stakeholders. Businesses invest in training and educating employees on the nuances of data, the terminologies, and the KPIs used in the process. 

Proper testing should be done to rule out flaws, and the bugs must be fixed before you release the BI tool. The reporting should be in a visually appealing, simple, and easy-to-use format, as the technical expertise of the stakeholders may vary widely. 

Best Business Intelligence Tools and Software

With advancements in UX, UI, and AI abilities, BI reporting has become more advanced than ever. There are several BI tools and software providers in the market, and you must understand the subtle nuances of each of their features and functionalities. 

We have covered some of the best business intelligence tools and software solutions in the coming section. 

Saas Ecommerce Platform	Free Trial Period	Pricing
	14 Days	Power BI Pro – $10 per user per month
	14 Days	Tableau Creator – $70 per user per month
	30 Days	Qlik Sense Business – $30 per month per user
	Contact the vendor	Custom pricing

1. Microsoft Power BI

Microsoft Power BI

13 Reviews

Power BI is an advanced visualization and business intelligence tool from Microsoft. It helps translate unorganized data into an interactive format delivering powerful insights and analytics. You can import data from Microsoft Excel, cloud-based servers, or on-premises data warehouses.

Using Power BI, businesses can analyze market trends and customer behavior and drive the design, evaluation, and implementation of impactful business decisions. As it can be used even by employees and business stakeholders with limited technical understanding, Power BI reports can be used by businesses across various industries and sectors. 

Key features

• Customizable dashboard
• Appealing visual elements
• Multiple data input formats
• Very informative reports
• Dataset filtration
• Adjustable tiles

Pricing

• Power BI Pro – $10 per user per month,
• Power BI Premium-  $20 per user per month, or $4995 per capacity per month.

Pros and Cons

2. Tableau

Tableau remains one of the most sought-after visualization tools. It goes well with different business requirements and is used across wide-ranging industries, including healthcare, education, finance, the public sector, etc. The best thing about Tableau is that you do not need technical skills and expertise to use the tool.

Tableau democratizes analytics for all, including analysts, business executives, IT teams, CEOs, etc. Using Tableau, you can create reports, stories, dashboards, graphs, charts, etc.   

Key features

• Data collaboration and sharing
• Data blending
• Real-time data analysis
• Dashboard 
• Gantt charts
• Trend analysis
• Advanced visualization
• Informative geographical maps

Pricing

• Tableau Creator – $70 per user per month,
• Tableau Explorer – $35 per user per month,
• Tableau Viewer – $12 per user per month.

Pros and Cons

3. Qlik Sense

Qlik Sense is a popular BI tool that helps transform data into meaningful visualization. It offers a comprehensive BI package that helps users process the data without the need for coding. You can host the tool on public cloud, private cloud, or on-premises, depending on the data sensitivity and legal requirements of your business.

Qlik Sense has AI and ML abilities and so has the power to generate predictive analytics and information. It also has search and conversational analytic abilities. Using Qlik Sense, you can develop custom applications and embed the visualizations into the website or application as required. 

Key features

• Self-service visualization
• Interactive dashboards
• Predictive analytics
• Responsive design
• Visually appealing reports
• Hybrid cloud platform
• Mobile analytics

Pricing

• Qlik Sense Business – $30 per month per user,
• Qlik Sense Enterprise SaaS – Custom quote.

Pros and Cons

4. Sisense

Sisense is an AI-powered business intelligence tool that helps businesses simplify complex data and deliver meaningful visualization. It has an intuitive interface, so even those business stakeholders without technical expertise can access the data, reports, and visuals. Sisense offers great customization and so is appropriate for businesses of different scales and sizes. 

The Sisense tool can extract data from multiple sources and deliver visually appealing dashboards that help businesses promote data-driven decisions. The BI reporting tool can be used by businesses in healthcare, government, supply chain, manufacturing, travel, hospitality, etc. 

Key features

• Unlimited dashboards
• User controls
• Interactive visualization
• Supports native-language queries
• Data unification
• Drag and drop template

Pricing

Pros and Cons

BI Reporting Dashboard Examples

In this section, we have covered some examples of BI reporting dashboards to help you gain a practical perspective of the whole process.

1. Customer Service Analytics Dashboard

While building dashboards for customer service teams, the key focus is on customer-related metrics and KPIs, including First call resolution, rate of unresolved calls, average response time, etc. The supervisors and managers can gain a complete picture of the performance of the customer service team and make important staffing decisions. 

2. Procurement Dashboard

Procurement dashboards help the purchase managers and the team collect supplier data and monitor procurement-related KPIs like turnaround time, compliance monitoring, rate of supplier defect, etc. These metrics help generate powerful reports and insights that streamline the procurement process of a business. 

3. Marketing Analytics Dashboard

Marketing dashboard help gain insights into the effectiveness and returns of the marketing spend. The dashboard helps track the KPIs and metrics of different marketing campaigns along with other key metrics like the cost of acquisition, customer lifetime value, click-through rate, etc. These insights help identify the marketing campaigns that yield meaningful results and increase the investment in those channels.

4. Warehouse Metrics Dashboard

The warehouse dashboard provides insights on warehouse and logistic-related KPIs and metrics. Businesses can use the data to optimize their warehouse operations. Common warehouse metrics include average order delivery time, fleet status, delivery status, logistic costs, on-time shipping, etc. 

Warehouse dashboards are gaining prominence in e-commerce businesses where customers are demanding quicker turnaround of their orders.

Conclusion

Business intelligence and reporting play a huge role in driving business decisions and optimizing the performance of different business departments.

The business intelligence market is evolving faster and is expected to reach $54.27 billion by 2030. More and more businesses are investing in building reliable intelligence tools, and those that do not invest risk losing out to the competition.  

BI reporting tools offer several advantages to businesses, including improvements in workflow speed, customer behavior prediction, cost optimization, predictive analytics, data literacy, and democratization, etc.

Frequently Asked Questions

Supriya is a highly skilled content writer with over 8 years of experience in the SaaS domain. She believes in curating engaging, informative, and SEO-friendly content to simplify highly technical concepts. With an expansive portfolio of long-format blogs, newsletters, whitepapers, and case studies, Supriya is dedicated to staying in touch with emerging SaaS trends to produce relevant and reliable content.