Why You Need Self-Service Reporting…With Complete Drill Down Functionality

Reporting doesn’t need to require therapy. Or Tylenol. For you or anyone within your organization. It certainly doesn’t need to cause a team member to stomp on a computer. Remember the scene in Office Space where Michael Bolton becomes so angry he destroys the office printer? There’s an answer to alleviating workplace stress and aggression against machinery: Self-Service Reporting. Self-service reporting, also known as ad-hoc analytics, enables non-technical users to create, edit and share reports and provide greater financial data insights to key decision-makers. The important note is without the need for IT or other dedicated in-house experts. This provides a big win for the IT team as well, freeing up the technical experts to focus on critical system management, maintaining data integrity, and optimizing the performance of all network applications, rather than drowning in reporting requests. Visibility into your company’s financials is a necessity. It’s imperative you’re able to see the financial health of your organization. And without the stress of needing to move mountains to get there. Equally important is the ability to see the details of each and every total within each of your reports. You can’t be left second-guessing where a number comes from, having to pour over endless spreadsheets just to get to the details or wait on your technical department to get back with you. This is where self-service reporting, with complete drill-down functionality, makes a huge difference in saving you time and your sanity. The more quickly you can find answers and move on with other responsibilities, the less time is wasted and the faster your team can make business decisions. Conceptually speaking, drill-downs exist everywhere in our computing world. Every day we click on folders on our computers to get to somewhere more specific. We experience this on the web pages we visit when we click on links from a homepage to navigate to deeper levels from that page. We drill-down through data every day. In reporting, drill-downs make our financial views more powerful and useful. They take the user from a more general view of the data to a more specific one with the click of a mouse e.g., drilling down to the details of your sales revenue by product, territory, salesperson, etc. Drill-downs provide you deeper insight into different layers of your data. If they’re done right, you can instantly answer questions such as: Which product is selling best in which location? Which salesperson is selling the most of each product? Which territories are underperforming? This type of information provides actionable data for decision-makers. Because each department has different needs, drill-down functionality allows them to see the data from their particular viewpoint and even display it through different visualization methods. This enhances each user’s understanding of data and the details behind every number. Drill-downs within reports also improve server performance. By showing only one data layer at any time, drill-down reports reduce server querying times. In robust reporting tools, such as Synoptix, you’ll find that you can also sort within your drill-downs, export your drill-down data, and even click to the next level of information. This ensures you have access to all of the information you need.