How Upgrading Your Reporting Will Make You More Efficient in the Workplace

We like to think of ourselves as productive people.

We've invented and implemented a variety of time-saving tips, tricks, and tools to automate all of the tedious tasks in our day-to-day life: recorded television to skip commercials, email sorters to remove the junk mail, top-news websites to read just the important headlines, and a smorgasbord of phone apps to make everything quicker and easier (shopping, banking, appointment reminders, you name it).

We are so dedicated to automating all of the boring and wasteful parts of our daily lives, why don't more of us translate those time-saving practices into business?

Big time-wasters at work

1). Email - sending and receiving. Nobody wants to or has the time to type up the same email fifty times, or look through each message in your inbox to sort the crap from the crucial. The solution? Automate both with an email sending management service, and an email sorter.

2). Meetings - if you're not the one running these things, then there's not much you can do about this one, I'm afraid. But meetings without clear goals can make for the biggest office time wasters. Who wants to spend hours discussing the same issue but getting nowhere?

3). Facebook - this counts as an at-home time waster as well. Ah, Facebook. We're all guilty of wasting a an hour (or a few) doing absolutely nothing on Facebook. But instead of having that little blue icon as your go-to for those hours that don't seem to end, keep the status browsing down to one time a day. It'll be tough, but you can do it.

But the biggest time waster?

Manual reporting. Yes, your trusty Excel is wasting you more time and money than you know. The data you're manipulating in a spreadsheet can be automated, and can be presented more clearly in a dashboard.

When it comes to your data, the process you use and format in which it is presented make all the difference. When your process is manual, and your format is a black and white spreadsheet, you're not utilizing your data the best you can. This is where report automation, or dashboards, come in.

Dashboards can:

• Save you time - by automating the reporting process you almost completely eliminate that task! Some companies have saved 90% of their time spent reporting by making the dashboard switch.

• Save you money - companies have been able to cut down their costs in big ways after using dashboards to better understand the wasetful costs in their business.
• Improve your focus - by having your data in a highly visible, central location, and presenting it in a clear visual format, you can align employees on goals and ensure everyone understands the data. 

• Make collaboration easier - dashboards let you leave notes and make comments directly on the data -- coupled with the fact that everyone is looking at the same data in the same way, it allows for easier pain-free collaboration.

• Eliminate micro-managing - nobody likes having their boss breathing down their neck, and nor does any boss particularly enjoy spending hours watching over every move. Dashboards completely eliminate this need by allowing users to create scheduled reports and stay up to date on the latest information. Give employees more autonomy through accountability.

We like to think of ourselves as productive people. So, why don't we put more productive practices into effect at work as well as at home? Automating our tedious time-wasting jobs at work can make the job we do have more efficient.

Want to learn more about making your workplace more efficient? Check out our newest webinar on