Business Reporting Best Practices: The Remarkably Simple Guide

It seems like there's a best practices guide to every subject imaginable, and the business reporting field is no exception. You'll find tips on general topics such as designing reports and meeting reporting requirements all the way down to specific details such as choosing appropriate output formats based on the functionalities of rendering extensions.

But when looking at the panoply of best practice guides, what we found really interesting is how different vendors present these best practices – and how this information illustrates and embodies their business reporting software model.

Consider software from the best-known reporting business, Crystal Reports. Crystal has a reputation for being complex, comprehensive and cryptic to the non-technical user, so it was no surprise to find Crystal's best practice guides were the same. Type "crystal reports best practices" into your favorite search engine and you'll immediately see what this means in practice. The top Google result is a PDF slideshow entitled "Best Practices for Crystal Reporting with SAP," and it typifies many of the other Crystal business reporting guides online. This PDF is meant to accompany a live presentation and begins with a tip on choosing the correct SAP connection driver. In other words, it's for those who have the time, training and temperament to invest resources into learning Crystal – and someone to help them translate along the way.

BIRT is another set of business reporting tools whose best practices revolve around training, in this case "two days of classroom training and three days of hands-on expert guidance." The Best Practice BIRT Report Design Package fact sheet explains how users can get the most from BIRT, including mastering such chores as integrating images into reports and influencing report behavior with parameters, in a live training session. Actuate Corporation, which co-leads BIRT, provides the services and trainings on-site.

Then there's the approach taken by such business reporting companies as Windward Reports. Windward presents a wide range of best practices guides that cover all aspects of reporting, from the general "what makes a great report" to the specifics on how to use Windward's software to its best advantage. For example, one of the Windward white papers offered on their web site discusses in-depth the seven key features that make a usable report. Company documentation includes a learning center with tips for tasks like designing business financial reporting templates and creating reports with Excel's built-in tools. And the knowledge base has articles like the one on how to make output report as pixel-to-pixel identical as possible when creating a template.