Reporting Tools in a Sales Environment
Dashboards
Using current data from almost any kind of database, users can create interactive data displays and reports for both analytical use and documentation. This can be especially useful in a sales oriented scenario.
Users can use Style Intelligence to track employee performance, products, inventory, sales, returns, and countless other sales-related metrics stored in a database. Using the aforementioned dashboards, this data is displayed dynamically where it can be filtered and sorted to show information relevant to the interests of the user. While the chosen database may contain millions of data-filled rows, a dashboard will only display that which the user deems necessary.
A good example is a dashboard designed to track employee performance. By default, this dashboard would contain an overview of all sales made by all employees. By manipulating the different elements present in a dashboard made in Style Intelligence, this information can be refined to show just the sales made by a certain salesperson between March of 2011 and today. This can be further distilled by region, state, or even product, depending on the user's preference and the administrator's permissions.
Alternatively, using a feature unique to Style Intelligence, brushing, users can highlight a specific data range in a chart, click a button, and watch as all the other elements of the dashboard update to reflect information pertinent to just that data range.
Reports
Reports are non-interactive data displays and thus cannot express as much information as efficiently as dashboards. In a report you may find it beneficial to focus on pre-filtered data. Reports are created using worksheets containing datablocks that query the database directly for user-defined information. Reports, like dashboards, update dynamically; that is to say that the data they display is up-to-the-minute, and not that they can be modified once they are generated.
Reports typically go into more detail than a dashboard. With InetSoft's BI solution, reports can actually be embedded directly into dashboards or other reports to create drill down data levels and tie information together.