What is a Self-service Reporting?

With the growing amount of data in business, data reporting and analysis are complicated. IT departments face challenges in collecting the reporting requirements from different departments and building multiple reports that meet different roles’ needs.  

At the same time, business people’s decision making depends on the speed and quality with which the IT department develops reports and is often tied to the IT department’s schedule.

With easy access to the data sources and an intuitive user interface, self-service reporting empowers business users to generate reports, make queries, and analyze business data without tying up IT departments. Users can make data-driven decisions regardless of technical skills. 

Traditional Vs. Self-Service Reporting

In general, traditional reporting focuses on building data platforms and providing report service led by the IT department. 

When using traditional reporting tools, the deployment and development cycle is long, which requires the architecture design and technical development of each module. Besides, reports developed by traditional reporting tools are rigid, and it takes IT a long time to meet new requirements. Therefore, business users need to wait for the IT departments to deliver the reports, causing delays in timely decision-making. 

Self-service reporting reduced dependence on IT staff and improved flexibility in business departments. It provides an intuitive interface for business users without technical expertise to easily connect and manipulate multiple data sources. So users can create the specific reports they need and get actionable insights in a timely fashion. 

Benefits of Self-Service Reporting

Self-service reporting tools can offer many advantages to all departments involved in the reporting process, including the IT staff and end-users. 

Increase flexibility and accessibility of reports 

By eliminating dependence on the IT departments, the self-service reporting tools give end-users the flexibility to create reports that they need to deal with constantly changing business problems. It means users can act with more agility than ever before.

Produce data insights more efficiently 

The reduced dependence on IT departments helps skip the tedious translation process for business requirements. The intuitive interface also makes it easier to analyze the business data, which makes dig deeper into their data quicker and makes it better and faster for decision making. You can compete with your competition in the forefront.

Let IT departments focus on more value-added tasks 

With self-service reporting, IT staff can be free from endlessly repeated work and don’t need to change reports from different departments. And after freeing from the routine data requests and reporting, their workload for simple tasks is reduced. They can devote themselves to more high-level priorities. 

FineReport’s Self Service Reporting Tool

With FineReport’s self-service reporting tool, you can make reporting accurately, efficiently, and effectively, and stay ahead of its competitors.

Intuitive interface

With an Excel-like interface, flexible reporting options, and numerous filters to choose from, users can create high-performance reports with ease.

Interactive analysis

The interactive analysis includes data tips, interactive highlighting, series interaction, online switch, coordinate scaling, and automatic refresh.

Export to different formats

Exporting outputs to different formats is a common request in the organization. FineReport supports exporting reports to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PNG, and so on.

Schedule/Email reports

To satisfy the need that some people want to get reports output via email. FineReport allows users to schedule frequency, format, and recipients of the reports. You can set up automatic daily/weekly/ monthly reports sent to whoever you want and always be up to date.

Alerts on exceptions

Alerting is a schedule that only runs when a specific condition is happening, which helps you monitor the abnormal conditions. After setting the warning value, FineReport would alarm you when abnormal conditions happen. 

Summary

Self-service reporting empowers business users to generate reports, make queries, and analyze business data without tying up IT departments. It’s time to choose a self-service reporting tool.

FineReport is free for personal use; you can download it for a free trial.