700 words Proposal Memo-APA Format(Note: No plagiarism)

Tim’s Down Town Car Repair Business

Memo

To:	Tim Smith
From:	Sravanthi Nallandula
cc:	Robert Hettinger
Date:	October 17, 2021
Re:	Proposal for reports on business case

Hello Tim,

Here is the proposal of reports which helps you in measuring business profits, managing supplies/suppliers, customers, bids, cost, and so forth. This proposal is made after analyzing your business case thoroughly and some of the best practices have been outlined.

For a successful business, forms and reports are key ingredients to analyze financial status and performance. Designing forms and reports is a user-centered activity that typically follows a prototyping. User-centered design refers to a design approach that involves an understanding of the target audience, their tasks and goals, information needs, experience levels, and so on. Gaining an understanding of “who, what, when, where, and how” is a required first step in the creation of any form or report. A report is a business document that contains only predefined data; it is a passive document used solely for reading or viewing. It typically contains data from many unrelated records or transactions [1]. It may be printed to a computer file, a visual display screen, or some other medium such as microfilm. Often a report has rows and columns of data, but a report may be of any format. There are many types of business reports such as Scheduled Reports, Key-Indicator Reports, Exception Reports, Drill-Down Reports, and Ad-hoc Reports. A brief description of all the reports might give an overview which reports are apt for your business case.

Scheduled Reports are the reports produced at predefined intervals—daily, weekly, or monthly—to support the routine informational needs of an organization. Key-Indicator Reports provide a summary of critical information on a recurring basis. Exception Reports highlight data that are out of the normal operating range. Drill-Down Reports provide details behind the summary values on a keyindicator or exception report. Ad-hoc Reports provides unplanned information requests in which information is gathered to support a non-routine decision [1].

As per business case, I will propose Key-Indicator and Drill-Down reports to measure all the criteria of your business. Key-Indicators provides a focus for strategic and operational improvement, create an analytical basis for decision making and help focus attention on what matters most using trend graphs and tabular formats. The use of KPIs includes setting targets and tracking progress against that target. It helps in evaluating the organization’s progress in achieving its strategic objectives depicted in customer, financial, internal processes and organizational capacity perspectives. They provide a structured and timely mechanism to see progress towards this objective - without the distraction of tracking too much or the wrong things [3]. The Key-Indicator reports are of analytical based, operational based and strategic based. A static version of analytical based report will typically show historical values, while interactive reports allow users to investigate the data by breaking down the individual metrics dynamically. Operational Reports are focused predominantly on the day to day activities to help make decisions or take action.

Drill-down reports are types of reports that give the user or viewer the ability to access other layers of data granularity.  In other words, it is a report in a digital form or within an application, and by clicking on certain elements or results you can access data elements that detail how that result or analysis was achieved.  By jumping from one level to another you also get more insight and can potentially notice flaws within the analysis or find out in which ways it can be misleading [2]. These reports are extremely beneficial in saving costs and time on performing analysis for the user. The main idea here is to have data that can be easily understood by the end-user, this way you ensure that the information analyzed is more accurate and is important to define comprehendible data layers. There are some parameters that can vary depending on the tool you are using, and you might have to get specific tools depending on the data you wish to analyze. But in general, the information will have a hierarchy or levels in order to comply with principles of drill-down reporting. The more you rely on drill-down capability the better chances you have to maximize the value of your sales report, user engagement metrics, or similar data. Report view that truly transports gives you information on multiple levels, not just the end result.

Reports helps in highlighting information like notifying errors in data entry or processing, provides warnings regarding unusual data, draws attention to keywords, high-priority messages. They can be highlighted using colors that help in drawing attention to warnings, facilitate subtle discriminations in complex displays, and emphasize the logical organization of information. It provides consistency, organized data, clarity, formatting, and flexibility of the business information.

While designing a report it is better to use light-weight graphics, to establish forms and data-integrity rules, and to use style-sheet based HTML. Lightweight graphics allows pages to load quickly and helps users to reach their final location in the site. Stylesheet-based HTML design allows the content of a web page to remain separate from the way it is formatted. By separating the content from its formatting information, it is much easier to update the look and feel of the website and make sure that all pages have a similar appearance.

References:

[1] Modern Systems Analysis and Design by Joseph S. Valacich, Joey F. George 8th Edition

[2] Drill Down Reports Vs Drill through Reports | FineReport. Retrieved October 17, 2021, from https://www.finereport.com/en/product-functions/drill-down-reports-and-drill-through-reports.html

[3] KPI Reports explained your complete guide (2021 Update). Retrieved October 17, 2021, from https://www.simplekpi.com/Blog/KPI-Reports-Explained-A-complete-guide

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