A weekly report should not take a day to build
In many businesses someone spends a full day each week building a report. By the time the owner reads it, the week it describes is over.
00%
GrowingPartneringBuildingGrowing
In many businesses someone spends a full day each week building a report. By the time the owner reads it, the week it describes is over.
It usually starts on Thursday or Friday. The operations manager exports jobs from one system, invoices from QuickBooks, hours from the timesheet spreadsheet and open quotes from somebody's email folder, and pastes it all into a master Excel file. Then comes the cleanup: job names typed three different ways, a supervisor who hasn't sent in hours, a formula that broke because a column moved, a chart to redraw. The report goes out as a PDF on Friday evening.
The owner reads it on Monday. A job that went over budget on Tuesday shows up six days later, long after anyone could have done something about it.
A better template or a faster person won't fix this for long. The report is slow because the data sits in several places, entered by different people at different times, and someone has to reconcile it by hand.
It's also fragile. If the person who builds it is out, there's no report that week. If they paste a wrong number, the owner makes a decision on it, and nobody notices until the next report disagrees.
Live reporting starts with entering each piece of data once, where the work happens. The technician closes a job on their phone and logs hours in the same app, and the invoice is created from that job instead of typed separately. The data is in one system from the start, so there is nothing to export or reconcile.
On top of that sits a dashboard that is always current. It shows the numbers you run the business on, for example jobs completed against plan, revenue billed this week, margin by job, quotes waiting for an answer and overdue invoices. Open it on Tuesday at ten and it shows Tuesday at ten. Supervisors see their own crews and the owner sees the whole business.
Alerts cover the rest. You set a limit and the system tells you when a number crosses it: a job goes over its budget, unbilled work piles up, overtime on one crew climbs past plan, or a large quote has had no reply for a week. The alert goes to the person who can act on it, on the day it happens.
The person who built the report gets that day back. They often know why margin dropped on a type of job or which customer always pays late, and now they have time to look into it instead of formatting spreadsheets.
We start with the report you already get, ask which numbers you act on, and trace each one back to where it's created. The first step is usually capturing one or two of those numbers at the source instead of typing them in later. The dashboard comes after the data is right, and it's the smaller job.
If someone in your business loses a day each week to a report, book a call and bring the last one you received. We'll show you which of those numbers could be live and what it would take to automate the rest.