The Basics of Reporting and Analytics

Everything you need to know about business analytics

Reporting and analytics are two terms that are often interchanged. You may have used to think that they are one and the same. And probably you have used one term in the place of another.

This article is about to change that as reporting and analytics are quite different. But let’s understand their definitions first.

Definitions

Reporting

Reporting is the process of compiling data from different sources and presenting it in a simple and easy-to-understand way. A business may need multiple types of reports, such as accounting reports, financial reports, and performance reports.

Analytics

Analytics is the process of finding insights from the data that will help you make intelligent decisions and create better strategies. Analytics enables you to find patterns, spot trends, make predictions, and learn valuable lessons from your previous campaigns.

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What is the difference between Reporting and Analytics?

It is easy to understand from the definitions that reporting and analytics are quite different. So let’s take a look at their 5 significant differences.

Purpose

Both reporting and analytics have very different purposes.

• Reporting gathers data by making observations. You need reporting to understand what’s happening with your campaigns, your employees, and your business.

• Analytics interprets that data to find patterns, insights, and trends. As a result, analytics assists you to build better strategies and help you make smart marketing decisions for the future.

Data Representation

This is one of the most significant differences between reporting and analytics. Due to their different purposes, the data representation is also different.

Reporting tries to take the data from different sources and format it to make it easy to understand. Hence, reporting focuses heavily on charts, graphs, bars, and other forms of visual representation.

However, analytics enables you to question the data that is already presented. It lets you find variables and derive insights. Hence, the representation differs.

Final Goals

Reporting has one goal - to transform the raw and unintelligible data into a meaningful and easily consumable format.

The goal of analytics is to go through the data and figure out problems with their solutions, things that are working, and things that are not.

Process

Both have different processes.

Reporting contains activities like formatting, creating, organizing, summarizing, and configuring.

Analytics contains activities like interpreting, analyzing, comparing, and examining.

People

Reporting involves tasks that are repetitive in nature. Some companies have a reporting analyst for these tasks. However, business heads or team leads that monitor specific business metrics do the reporting in many companies.

For analytics, the tasks require customization as you need to observe data and cull insights. Hence, most businesses have data analysts or data scientists to perform such tasks.

Reporting and Analytics Tools

Modern reporting and analytics tools make it easier to organize data and interpret it.

Some famous modern reporting tools are:

• Google Analytics

• Hive

• Tableau

• Zoho Analytics

• Power BI

• Whatagraph

Some famous modern analytics tools are:

• Tableau

• Excel

• Google Data Studio

• Microsoft Power BI

• Thoughtspot

• Qlik

Steps to prepare a Report

This how a normal reporting process looks like:

• Understand the business requirements

• Collecting raw data

• Converting technical data into an easily understood format

• Understanding context

• Organize the information in a reporting dashboard

Data Analytics Steps

Here are the key steps involved in data analytics:

• Define the objective

• Gathering and cleaning the data

• Building analytical models to analyze data

• Analyze the data and find insights using tools

• Share the results with

What does Your Business Need & Why

The simple answer is - both. Your business needs both reporting and analytics.

You need reporting to gather, organize, and present your business data in a formatted and easily understandable manner.

On the other hand, you need analytics to gather insights and create an actionable strategy.

Both co-exist and are equally important. They complement each other in a certain way.

Final Words

As you can see, both reporting and analytics are different and have different processes. But your business needs both to thrive.

It is essential that your business has a reporting and analytics partner with proven expertise.

Or, you can hire in-house reporting and data analysts to make the tasks much more manageable.