The meteoric rise of AI-powered business intelligence tools has fundamentally altered how we extract value from data. This idea is further represented in this MIT SMR Connections research which shows 67% of leaders are using GenAI for data and analytics. And the results are evident: early adopters are experiencing increased customer satisfaction, greater revenue growth, and a better competitive edge than lagging peers.
However, implementing these powerful analytical capabilities requires you to have a clear understanding of business intelligence (BI) reporting. By knowing the capabilities of BI reporting, you can empower business users to quickly analyze both internal and external data points, and more importantly, use that analysis to make decisions and take action.
This article will take you through the world of BI reporting, including its types, examples, and best practices to ensure that you stay ahead in today’s data-driven world.
Table of contents:
Business intelligence reporting is a BI tool that helps users create reports and dashboards to identify trends, find hidden insights, and track performance for data-driven decision-making. These reports provide valuable insight into a project’s progress, a campaign’s outcome, or identify whether you’re on track to meet specified goals. BI reporting also includes capabilities like interactive data visualizations, advanced analytics, and real-time KPI monitoring, giving leaders and business users access to relevant, real-time insights.
BI reporting pulls data from various sources, such as customer databases, financial information systems, and customer relationship management software, to generate insights that can help shape a business’s strategies and operations. Depending on your company’s data architecture, these BI reports often leverage data in a cloud data platform such as a cloud data warehouse or data lakehouse.
Once the collected data is processed, you can analyze it to uncover insights such as purchasing patterns, product performance, and customer demographics. These insights can be visualized through dashboards and reports through drag-and-drop functionality. Your team can also customize their reports and dashboards using different visualizations like tables, histograms, or pie charts. With BI reporting, there are a variety of possibilities for analyzing and visualizing your data.
Let’s explore how modern BI reporting tools are helping businesses gain greater value from their data:
1. Faster problem solving
Modern BI reporting enables real-time data monitoring that allow users to analyze data using intuitive visualizations and reports. Whether you want to compare month-on-month sales growth or deep dive into your revenue projections, BI reporting provides a visually intuitive, real-time snapshot of your data. This level of accessibility will help you develop proactive strategies to navigate changing market conditions effectively.
And it doesn’t stop there—by adopting a self-service analytics platform like ThoughtSpot, you make insights accessible to everyone—not just experts. With Spotter as your AI analyst, insights are just a question away. Business leaders can ask simple questions such as “Which product drove the highest revenue in California?” and unlock detailed reports to take immediate action. Such conversational experiences enhance data accessibility, making the entire process of data exploration and decision-making engaging for everyone.
2. Better data exploration
Modern BI reporting can help you visualize trends in data so you can discover the underlying factors driving your business performance. From exploring different data vantages to pinpointing anomalies, BI reporting offers a high-level vantage, making it easier for business users to identify patterns they would’ve otherwise missed. With such advancements, they gain greater visibility into their operations, allowing them to course-correct their strategy in real-time.
Moreover, with an AI-powered BI solution like ThoughtSpot, you can leverage powerful augmented analytics capabilities such as SpotIQ and AI Highlights to discover the ‘why’ behind unexpected changes. With the one-click analysis feature, you can quickly pinpoint the key drivers—whether it's shifts in customer behavior, pricing adjustments, or market trends. As a result, you gain immediate clarity, enabling you to optimize existing business strategies for maximum impact.
3. Improved communication
With BI reporting, business users can convert raw data into interactive visualizations and share those insights organization-wide, enabling cross-functional teams to collaborate faster. By turning complex data concepts into detailed reports that are clear, concise, and easy to understand, stakeholders can grasp key insights and make data-driven decisions with confidence.
Moreover, with modern BI reporting like ThoughtSpot, you can create real-time Liveboards—that allow you to add contextual summaries to your visualizations. You can even add Notes and pin important findings, offering stakeholders a broader narrative.
Business intelligence reporting can be divided into four main categories:
Descriptive reports
Descriptive analytics reports provide an overview of past performance and current trends. They often include data points such as customer demographics, sales volume, cost analysis, and market share. Descriptive reports are beneficial for tracking long-term performance or identifying changes in customer behavior over time.
Diagnostic reports
Diagnostic reports provide insight into why specific outcomes occurred. These reports can be used to pinpoint rifts in the customer journey, identify potential risk areas, or isolate root causes of issues. Diagnostic reports also allow businesses to apply corrective measures and improve performance.
Predictive reports
Predictive reports provide an outlook on future performance. They use historical data to make forecasts and predictions about products, services, and customer behaviors. Predictive reports are essential for planning and budgeting purposes.
Prescriptive reports
Prescriptive reports suggest a course of action for optimal results. They provide deep insights into customer needs and offer recommendations on how to best meet those needs. With prescriptive reports, businesses can anticipate demands and adjust strategies accordingly.
Business intelligence software
Business intelligence is the most common tool used to generate BI reports. This type of software uses data from various sources to generate insights and identify trends that can help inform decisions. Modern BI can be flexible and modern, born to handle cloud-scale data, or more legacy solutions that allow users to download byte-sized pieces of data for analysis. While most modern data professionals prefer the former, there are still users who leverage desktop-first BI tools.
Data visualization tools
Data visualization tools can help make BI reports more understandable. These tools take complex data sets and transform them into graphical representations that provide a clearer picture of the underlying information. The most valuable of these tools make the visualizations interactive, so you can drill into the underlying data as the report is built.
Data stack
Every BI report requires leveraging a company’s data stack, which includes data storage, governance, security, ingestion, and analytics. Companies leading with data today have adopted the modern data stack, which often includes cloud data platforms such as Snowflake, Databricks, Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, and Azure Synapse, ETL or ELT tools like Fivetran and Matillion, data catalogs, and more By using these best of breed tools in concert with the right analytics experience, companies can empower their entire organization to quickly generate, understand, and act upon powerful BI reports.
Creating a business intelligence report involves several steps:
1. Gathering and cleaning data
The first step in creating a BI report is gathering and cleaning the data. This involves collecting data from various sources, such as databases, spreadsheets, web services, SaaS applications, mobile devices, third-party data markets, and more. The data must also be checked for accuracy and formatted properly before it can be used in the report.
2. Analyzing and interpreting data
Once the data is gathered, it must be analyzed and interpreted in order to draw meaningful insights. This process involves looking for patterns and trends within the data and then interpreting them to understand their implications. This can be done by data analysts, or for organizations that have adopted true self-service analytics, by anyone in the company.
3. Creating the report
Once the data has been analyzed, it is time to create the actual report. This involves combining the insights from the analysis with visuals, such as graphs and charts, to present a clear picture of the data. There are many benefits to data visualization in reports, but it is important to choose the right visuals and formatting to ensure that the report is easy to understand.
4. Distributing and sharing the report
Once the report is complete, it must be distributed and shared with those who need access to it. This can be done through email, Slack, Google Sheets, and Microsoft Teams, as a PDF, or in slides.
Let’s discover how BI reporting is driving data-driven decisions across different industries with real-world examples:
1. Financial industry
By leveraging BI reporting, financial service companies can analyze a large amount of customer data generated by the growing use of digital banking. This information includes analyzing data from various sources such as online payments and mobile transactions to create hyper-connected experiences and strengthen customer loyalty. This deep understanding empowers finance leaders to anticipate customer demands, identify emerging trends, and foster stronger relationships with their clientele, ultimately leading to increased customer loyalty and satisfaction.
2. Healthcare industry
Healthcare organizations face significant challenges in identifying opportunities where they can cut unnecessary costs while ensuring patients receive the care they need. BI reporting equips healthcare professionals with the tools and insights necessary for making well-informed decisions about patient care, risk management, and overall business performance.
For instance, generating monthly reports about patient counts helps healthcare professionals reduce operational inefficiencies, optimize resource allocation, and better understand patient trends to improve care delivery.
3. Manufacturing industry
With BI reporting, manufacturers can integrate data from various data sources such as inventory management and procurement systems to study how materials or component parts are being sourced, assembled, and ultimately transported to the customers. Access to real-time insights into supplier data can help them identify bottlenecks, reduce waste, and optimize processes for a seamless supply chain operation.
4. Retail industry
Retail leaders can monitor their sales performance against set targets to identify best-selling products, pinpoint high-performing regions, and forecast future sales trends. Consequently, these reports are also helpful for decision-makers to evaluate current operations or explore new revenue opportunities. Drawing such insights can also help retail leaders keep their operational costs to a minimum and unlock next-level productivity.
Creating and using business intelligence reports is not without its challenges. Organizations must consider the following when working with BI reports:
Data security and privacy
The data used in a BI report should always be kept secure and confidential, which is why data governance is a critical element of success with BI. Companies should use encrypted methods to store their data, as well as other security measures to protect it from unauthorized access.
Managing large and complex data sets
BI reports often involve working with large and complex datasets. This requires organizations to have the right technology in place for data management.
Keeping up with new technologies
With so many new technologies emerging, it can be difficult to keep up with all the changes that affect BI reporting. Companies must stay up-to-date on the latest developments in order to ensure that their reports remain accurate and effective.
To ensure the most effective use of business intelligence reporting, organizations should adopt the following best practices when creating and using reports.
Setting clear KPIs and metrics
Before creating a report, it is important to set clear objectives and KPIs so that the report can be tailored to meet those goals. This will help ensure that the data included in the report is relevant and helps provide useful insights.
Using the right visualization techniques
Choosing the right data visualizations is critical for creating a successful BI report. Using visuals that are easy to understand, such as graphs and charts, will help readers quickly identify insights from the data.
Ensuring data reliability
It is essential to ensure that the data used for a BI report is accurate. This means double-checking the data reliability and making sure it matches the source from which it was collected.
Regularly reviewing and updating the report
To ensure that the insights in a BI report remain relevant, organizations should regularly review and update their reports. This will help keep the report up-to-date and ensure that the data included is still accurate.
By following these best practices, businesses can create effective business intelligence reports that provide meaningful insights to help inform their decisions.
Today’s business environment can be easily characterized as fast-moving and customer-driven. To thrive in such a competitive space, you need modern BI reporting capabilities that allow you to leverage the right data at the right time.
With ThoughtSpot’s AI-powered analytics, you empower everyone—from your marketing to your customer support team—to unlock decision-ready insights from their data. No matter where your business data lives or how specific your question is, ThoughtSpot delivers reliable answers in an intuitive, conversational experience, allowing users to endlessly explore their data until their curiosity is satisfied.
Want to experience this yourself? Request a ThoughtSpot demo today to see how it can bring your data to life.
