“I need a list of the customers who bought bakery products this month!”
“Is the pay slip for each employee printed?”
“Which was the paint production during the 3rd shift yesterday?”

All these questions will be answered by looking at a piece of paper filled with information from a computer. Either is a pay slip, either is a summary of invoices, even an individual invoice, all these documents are reports.

A report is a collection of electronic data organized to present some information. Most frequently the report is structured as a list or table: for example the list of the customers from a state or a table with the raw materials used to make a product.

The report is the most used interface between humans and information systems when data extraction is required. An interesting feature is that the access to a computer is not mandatory: the report can be a piece of paper.

Why reports?

Just remember your day today. How often have you handled a printed paper? It doesn’t matter if it was a balance sheet, an invoice (from a client or to a client) or a production plan. The lists, tables or charts on that piece of paper have been answer to your questions. Or to questions asked by others.

We want or not, the reports are part of our life. Lets see some of their benefits and ways to improve our life…

Key features

• Is the most important method to extract data from information systems.
• The utmost majority of printed documents are reports.
• Require extremely low maintenance resources.
• Reports are very flexible, they can be adapted to any existing information system and can be configured according to users’ requests.
• A reporting solution is very easily understood and used by people who is already familiar with the system where from the data comes.

Key benefits

• Reports facilitate access to information. A report can be acquired by email or Internet, at home or in the middle of your meeting with a customer.
• A notice when the report is available will considerably reduce the waiting time.
• The quality of typical reports is comparable with quality of brochures.
• Reports can be adapted to a person’s work style, which will significantly improve productivity.
• You can delegate report execution and use the time for other activities.
• The cost for implementing reports is a small fraction of the cost for implementing the data source systems.
• Reports can be easily archived in various user-friendly formats, which can be easily restore later, when needed.
• Unauthorized access to information is restricted.
• Reports do not require an expensive or complex hardware infrastructure. In most cases reports will run on users’ workstations. Therefore scalability is also excellent.