By Wendy Dessler
Running a business, whether offline or online, can be a lot of work. While many people dream of becoming an entrepreneur or running a business, the chances of success are unfortunately not as high as you might hope. In fact, only around half of all small businesses will survive into their 5th year.
One of the best ways to ensure your business is successful is to make sure you remain in tune with all that is happening. To do this successfully, you will often need to see actual reports that outline your success. Thankfully, technology has made it easier than ever to produce a wide range of reports that you can analyze. These business reports can be quite important to your business for a number of different reasons.
Without any further ado, this article is going to look at a few different reports that your business needs to check out on a regular basis.
Website Analytics Report
With more and more people using the internet to shop or influence purchases, it is important to have a good business website. You should also be monitoring the various different analytics produced by your site. This can give you insights on your customers and the overall success of your business. However, in addition to knowing things like traffic, traffic sources and demographics, there are many more analytics and information that you should familiarize yourself with. For example, you should be sure to frequently check out your logs.
Your website or software will create logs, which are essentially a time-stamped documentation of events. Anything that happens on your site such as successful logins, failed logins, security threats or dozens of other events will be logged. By checking these logs, automatically or manually, you will have a good idea what is going on behind the scenes. If you want to learn more, be sure to check out the advantages of Apache Logging Basics.
A Productivity/Time-Tracking Report
The employees at your company are incredibly important to the success or failure of your business. If they are productive and on-task, you will likely be successful. However, if they are wasting time or generally being unproductive, it can hurt your bottom line. And unfortunately, while the internet has helped businesses in a lot of ways, it can also be a massive distraction for employees.
To ensure everyone is on-task and productive, you should be sure to use a software that can produce a productivity or time-tracking report. These types of reports will be able to tell you what your employees are really doing while they are clocked in at the office. This can help you address potential issues directly and ensure everyone remains productive while at work.
A Variety of Financial Reports
Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay
Of course, one of the single biggest indicator of the success of your business is your finances. Not only do you have to be making money, but you also need to ensure you are spending less than you are making, too. Thankfully, there are a variety of different financial reports that can provide you with all of this information and more.
You should be checking sales and revenue reports, expense reports, your balance sheet, your budget and even cash flow statements. Each of these reports can provide you different information about the finances of your business. They can help you notice if anything needs to be changed and can assist in making important business decisions.
Featured Image by rawpixel from Pixabay
About the Author: Wendy Dessler frequently writes about the latest advancements in tech and digital marketing. She currently focuses on helping SaaS businesses create a better world for our kids.
