7 Reasons to Start Report Automation

Do you often find yourself spending hours manually extracting data cutting and pasting to create reports, and then have to repeat the whole thing, time and time again? Consolidating data across sources, crunching numbers and creating reports can be a tedious process. Nobody likes doing the same things over and over. How much better it would be if you could simply automate report generation. There are lots of reasons to automate beyond saving yourself mindless work- here are some to inspire you to take action:

7 reasons to start report automation now

1. Be more organized

Do your colleagues have to nudge you time and again to give them updated reports? Get organized with Analytics Canvas Automation, which is designed to generate reports whenever you need them.  With this tool, you’ll be able to get through the next reporting period with ease, delivering updates to your clients faster without adding more resources or hiring new analysts.

2. Deliver more reports in the same amount of time

Do you envy those people whose organization allows them time for flexibility and creative work? Once you have automated your reporting, you’ll have time that you can then spend on innovative projects. What you’re now doing manually could be performed by automation, delivering the same results in a fraction of the time. Reducing such a time-consuming and repetitive task will make you more productive, and more efficient.

3. Impress your boss – make more sophisticated reports

Updating dashboards by campaign, region or brand may take a while to complete. No matter how skilled you are, it takes a great deal of time and effort to gather all the relevant data and run reports if you are doing it manually, so often you will reduce the level of detail or scope of the report to reduce the effort required. Want to impress your boss by providing detailed, sophisticated reports quickly, and everytime? Automation software let’s you do just this.

4. Avoid having to become a programmer – or hire one. Use a visual interface to define queries and transforms

Are you preparing your reports in Excel? If so, chances are that you’ve heard of Macros and VBA programming. These programs are hard to learn and offer limited functionality. In contrast, an automation tool can offer an visual interface, that doesn’t require a writing code or programming from the command line. You can pull unsampled data from Google Analytics and combine it with other sources, such as databases and Excel tables, and combine it in one single report without writing a single line of code. In an automation tool, queries can be built a step at a time, rather than having to write a huge complex query in SQL all at once.

5. No more working late or weekends in the office preparing that detailed report

Remember the evening that you worked late to put together the report for the client meeting the next day? Automating your report generation means reduced workload, and an increase in time and productivity, letting you focus on more important things – like making money for your company.

6. No more typos and cut and paste errors

Broken formulas and macros, missing values and references – does this sound familiar? Updating an old report can be a hassle. Being able to deliver a report quickly is important, but so is being able to ensure that things are accurate. Automating your reports eliminates the manual errors that inevitably happen from time to time. With reduced errors, you reduce the headaches too, and deliver a much greater level of compliance.

7. Increase the frequency of analysis

In our fast-paced world it seems there is never enough time to get everything done before the end of the day. Your clients rely on the analyses you provide for their business decisions. But if the effort required is too high, some reports only get built once a month, or once a quarter. By the time you see something going wrong, its been going wrong for weeks- and maybe you’ve wasted money on bad advertising or missed out on potential sales. If you’ve automated your analysis, you can run it every day, or every week. Now you catch problems quickly, respond, and optimize quickly.

How to set up report automation with Analytics Canvas

Well, not a big surprise- we happen to want you to try our particular report automation tool. 🙂

While many tools claim to provide the benefits above, we believe that Analytics Canvas is a particularly powerful solution when it comes to tackling report automation- especially when you are using sources like Google Analytics. We encourage you to try them all- many of our clients have, and have chosen us in the end.

Analytics canvas is a powerful tool that lets you get your data from multiple sources and combine it using a visual interface. Once you have a feel for how its “blocks and connectors” work, you’ll be creating queries that even the IT department couldn’t deliver.

After switching to Analytics Canvas, the time spent on monthly reporting went from weeks to just hours.Jon Atteberry, Tech Target

Analytics Canvas’s Automation Wizard integrates with your existing enterprise system to create automated reports when needed. For example, it can execute your analysis at night, so all the reports are ready by the time you arrive at the office the next morning. In Windows, Automation Wizard generates “batch” files (.bat) that you can schedule to run from the command line or by using any scheduling tool, such as Windows Scheduler.

It is an easy process that can be performed in 3 steps.

• Step 1: Create a report or a dashboard template that you would like to automate. Use Analytics Canvas to map the data visually from source to the various excel ranges in the template. Now all those steps happen in one click.
• Step 2: Run the Automation Wizard and configure automation options. You can define email notifications, and run multiple reports at once.
• Step 3: Schedule report generation and arrive at work knowing that all your reports have already been generated, waiting for you.

Are you going to start leveraging automation? Give it a try with the Analytics Canvas trial.