This article is only for educational purposes and does not constitute legal or financial advice. Make sure you consult a professional regarding your specific business needs.
From keeping tabs on your
To find useful insight into how your accounting business is performing, you need to go a step further and analyze all this data. By doing so, you can figure out what’s working, what isn’t, and what you need to change to grow and improve.
Whether you need deeper insights into your client trends or an assessment of your financial operations, business reports can help you evaluate a particular issue or set of circumstances that relate to your business’s performance. So any business owner or decision maker can (and should) know what goes into writing a report.
Why are business reports important?
Business reports make it easier to analyze your core business and evaluate its overall health. With the right software, business reports give you a simple way to identify issues or successes so you can fix those problems or encourage results. Not only that, but they give you an indication of whether you’re meeting your goals. With that information, you can strategically plan for the future.
What goes into a business report?
A business report really needs one thing: data. That data should be focused on a specific part of your business, and, ideally, be visualized in a way that makes it easy to understand what is happening.
If you work or have worked at a larger company, you might be familiar with a business report that’s slightly more formal. More formal business reports are useful if you need to share the data with other people as they usually include some kind of written analysis with the data.
Whether you need to write up something more formal or you’re just reviewing data for your own purposes, here are a few steps to get the most out of your business reports:
- Identify the issue: It’s helpful if you go into your reporting tool knowing what you want to figure out — whether its invoicing or employee performance.
- Explore the issue: Once you’ve decided what you want to explore, start looking at that data from every possible angle. The more ways you look at the data, the more insights you might be able to glean.
- Inform recommendations: Once you have an idea of what’s happening with your business, you need to decide how you can either fix the issue or encourage similar results. In some cases, you might even recommend doing nothing.
3 categories of must-have business reports
You can create a business report for any part of your business, but here are three types that are particularly useful:
Revenue reports
Revenue is the lifeblood of your business. Revenue reports can help you analyze trends in volume over time to make sure your business is healthy. You can create these at any time to see if you need to adjust your strategy.
Payment Methods
A summary of the total collected and any associated fees from credit, debit, and other tender types.
If you run a firm, your most valuable resource is your team.
Creating business reports with Square
You have a lot to juggle as a business owner, and finding the time to create these reports can be a challenge. The good news is, you can save time — and still get the information you need — by outsourcing business reports to your
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