How a Data Integration Platform Eliminates Manual Reporting Chaos

How many businesses prefer to engage in manual reporting when extracting data from various tools and apps? The answer might surprise you. Despite all the technological advances and innovations, some people are convinced that a manual approach is safer – and true, it might work to some extent.

However, as soon as your small company begins to grow, the number of data integration challenges becomes insurmountable. Find out why manual reporting leads to chaos and how a solid data integration platform can help eliminate it.

What does manual reporting entail? You need to collect data from many different systems, including all the apps your business relies on, the tools that facilitate your regular operations, databases you work with, and so on.

And that’s just brushing the surface. You need to clean this data, adjust formats, and combine all the facts in one readable report. Doing it even once already requires hours and days of time; such a waste of resources which is why using a professional data integration tool is essential in modern conditions. Such tools work automatically, drawing all the info you need from various sources and combining it without your direct input.

So, what are the manual reporting problems? How can they disrupt your workflow, and what impact does this have on your work? Here is a quick overview:

• Different systems have different formats, and it will take you a lot of time to integrate info from them without facing any technical issues.

• Your reports can easily get inconsistent: for example, you might delete a row by accident, apply filters wrongly, or overwrite the complete and accurate data version.

• Reports might also be late because a single error in data can mess up the related content across various tools, and correcting it will trigger an even bigger time loss.

• These errors in workflows lead to poor decision-making on the part of teams: they devise their strategies based on incorrect data, which can affect your profit negatively.

• Little time is spent on analysing the reports and deriving growth-based insights from them; most people are busy doing manual reporting, while others sit around waiting for this data.

These are just the most common manual data integration issues. They are inevitable when you are drawing info from disconnected systems on your own; each of them will slow down your workflow, leading to a waste of profit and human resources.

The best way to dissolve the chaos of manual reporting is by using specialised data integration platforms. They don’t replace human workers, but they free their schedules to a point where their efficiency can jump by a huge margin. Here is an example: an impressive 81% of developers claimed that the integration of AI into their workflows increased their productivity. Specialists in other industries feel similarly, as their efficiency skyrockets.

Let’s see how reporting automation tools can help optimise your workflow and get rid of all the chaotic manual integration issues we mentioned above:

• They collect unlimited volumes of data from a multitude of tools and platforms, and they do it in record time.

• Integration tools and platforms standardise the data they extract automatically, so it looks the same way, which increases its readability.

• The same rules for data cleaning are applied to each data integration process, so once you find a setup that works for you, you can use it throughout all operations.

• Integration tools compile reports with the data they process by themselves, and if something is missing, they can inform you right away.

• Such tools are also capable of doing basic data analysis, which can help the teams get preliminary insights.

The best part about integration tools is that they can deliver and update the info in real time. Let’s say you own an e-store: the moment a customer places an order, you will receive an update with all the data you need to know.

You can set up scheduled data extraction and integration, too. When such tools take care of time-consuming, boring processes, you get a chance to focus on what really matters and receive valuable info in polished and chaos-free formats.