Client Reporting Automation in 2024: Top 9 Benefits

Customer reporting is the process of informing your customer about the progress, or the lack thereof, that they have made by partnering with your company.

Customer reports are important because they:

• Shed light on whether a change of direction is needed
• Identify successes
• Highlight obstacles and bottlenecks
• Ensure that all parties are on the same page

However, manually gathering and presenting all the documents, information, and details to generate a customer report can be time-consuming and inaccurate. Inaccuracies, especially, undermine the company’s true value to the customer.

The adoption of automated client reporting software can solve these problems. And it’s our aim in this article to explain why that is so by discussing its top 9 benefits, such as transparency, efficiency, and scalability.

What is client reporting automation software?

Client reporting automation is a software that automates the entire client reporting process, from gathering data from various business ERP systems, to inputting it on a singular file, and to sending it to the client on scheduled dates.

What are the benefits of client reporting automation?

1. Accurate reporting

Automated solutions gather numbers as they are shown on the databases. This means unless the script has been incorrectly programmed, RPA bots will collect the reporting numbers as they are shown on ERP systems.

The implication is that manual mistakes, such as putting an extra zero where there shouldn’t be, or overlooking some sets of data, will be minimized. Clients will, therefore, receive an accurate report that neither over nor underestimates the state of affairs.

2. Transparency

A tangent of accuracy is transparency. Because all the collected data is originated from ERP applications in real-time, if there ever arises a need to backtrack on a specific number, fact, or figure, the software allows for a visible audit trail.

3. Suitable for all industries

No matter the nature of services that the company provides its clients, and for which it has to gather performance data on, automated reporting solutions can be programmed to collect the relevant performance data from the any industry-specific ERP system.

Whether the company in question is selling its clients fish, or does their advertising, as long as the performance data are tracked and stored on an ERP system, through API and RPA, the reporting solution can seamlessly gather them.

4. Timely reporting

Just as email drafts can now be scheduled to sent to the recipient on a specific date and time, client reports would follow the same path. This means, for instance, that if the partnership contract had stipulated that reports should be sent on the first day of every month at 9AM, that will be the case. And that is because the software can be triggered to start at specific junctions, gather all the data in minutes, and promptly send them along.

5. Increased back-end efficiency

Most reporting processes involves copying and pasting different datasets from one application and column onto another. And as “simple” as the process may sound, it’s menial, mind-numbing, and time-consuming.

A company’s employees’ time can be spent more productively elsewhere, where they can focus their attention and devote their time to value-oriented tasks, such as customer service, lead nurturing and more. That’s because the reporting solution has now taken over the manual tasks that were previously the responsibility of employees.

6. Scalability

The more clients a company has, the more effort has to be dedicated to gathering the data pertaining to them. This is also true with the scope of a business activities: the more services a company provides its clients, the more software platforms they will have to use to collect the relevant information.

The benefit of an automated client reporting solution is that it can be scalable to more clients, and be integrated into different ERP platforms, with minimal extra fees, IT intervention, and effort.

7. Data-driven performance success

Automated, digitized reports leave a digital footprint. The more efficient and accurate a company’s reporting, the more leverage it will have to use its reporting success as a basis for attracting new customers. And the promises it makes about the accuracy of its reports won’t be empty promises, because it will have that digital footprint to back them up with.

8. Establishing long-term relationships with clients

A company’s relationship with its current clients that it’s curating these reports for can be made deeper, and would last longer, with a consistent level of performance. On-time client reports, accurate reporting, and transparency would bond the customer with the company more closely. Moreover, the customers themselves would be more likely to refer the company to others.

9. Automated visualization for easier interpretation

Plain numbers can be uninteresting, especially to high level executives that only want some recognizable metrics to digest in a few minutes, instead of shifting back and forth between different tables.

Automated reporting solutions have in-built commands for data visualizations. Even if the staff themselves are unfamiliar with graphics and visualization, they can create commands for the bots to create charts and graphs on their behalf. Visualization of data will make it easier to interpret, read, and understand.

For more on reporting

To learn more about reporting automation, read:

• RPA for reporting: Ultimate Guide with 17 Use Cases
• Self Service Reporting: The Ultimate Guide

If you believe your business would benefit from adopting a reporting software, we have a data-driven list of vendors prepared.

Go through them, and we will help you choose the best one suited to your needs: