What is BI Reporting?

BI (Business Intelligence) reports are structured documents that summarize data and insights across key business areas. Often referred to as static reports, they are generated by BI tools that collect, analyze, and visualize data from multiple sources.

[ALT Text: Infographic depicting data transformation. On the left, charts and graphs; an arrow points right towards icons labeled CSV, XLS, PPT, and PDF, indicating export options.]

Why Do You Need BI Reporting?

In today's fast-paced business environment, having quick access to relevant data is essential for effective decision-making. BI reporting helps make sense of complex data and transforms it into timely, actionable insights.

Imagine a scenario: a sales manager overwhelmed by spreadsheets while trying to assess regional performance. BI reporting simplifies this task. With just a few clicks, the manager can export a focused report directly from the dashboard—covering sales metrics, customer segments, or product trends. These reports, often in formats like CSV, Excel, or PDF, enable fast, informed decision-making.

Use Cases Solved by BI Reporting

Many contemporary business intelligence (BI) platforms now offer capabilities for generating reports, making these features standard in the BI landscape. Users can also enhance their BI experience by integrating third-party plugins or tools, thereby unlocking additional features. Some common use cases include:

Financial Performance Report: Summarizes financial metrics such as revenue, expenses, profitability, and cash flow, enabling executives to assess the organization's financial health.
Marketing Campaign Analysis: Evaluates the effectiveness of marketing campaigns by analyzing metrics like click-through rates, conversion rates, and return on investment (ROI).
Customer Segmentation Report: Segments customers based on demographic, behavioral, or psychographic attributes, facilitating targeted marketing and personalized customer experiences.
Supply Chain Optimization Report: Identifies bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and optimization opportunities within the supply chain, enhancing operational efficiency and reducing costs.
Employee Performance Report: Tracks employee productivity, performance metrics, and key HR KPIs to optimize workforce management and talent development strategies.

Challenges in BI Reporting

BI reporting involves not just getting data from BI dashboards to the right people, but doing it efficiently.

Here are some key characteristics of BI reports:

Static Nature: Unlike interactive dashboards or real-time analytics, static reports are fixed documents that present data at a specific point in time. They don't allow for user interaction or dynamic updates.
Structured Format: BI reports usually follow a structured format with predefined sections such as summaries, charts, tables, and key performance indicators (KPIs). This format helps stakeholders quickly grasp important information.
Data Visualization: While they often include visual elements like charts, graphs, and diagrams, the challenge is ensuring these visualizations effectively highlight trends, patterns, and outliers within the data.
Scheduled Distribution: Ensuring timely delivery to relevant stakeholders is crucial, but scheduling and managing this distribution can be complex.
Customization: While static reports can be customized to some extent, they lack the interactivity of dynamic dashboards, which may limit their usefulness for some users.

Popular BI Report Formats and Their Advantages:

[ALT Text: Icons of four file types: a blue CSV with text lines, a green XLS with a table, an orange PPT with a pie chart, and a red PDF with text blocks.]

CSV (Comma-Separated Values):

Advantages:

Universally recognized format, compatible with most data analysis tools.
Lightweight and easy to generate, facilitating quick data transfers and integrations.

Use Cases:

Data can be imported into spreadsheet applications like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets for further analysis.
Sharing raw data with analysts or stakeholders for custom analysis and processing.

Excel:

Advantages:

Robust data manipulation capabilities, including pivot tables, charts, and formulas.
Familiar interface and widespread adoption, making it accessible to a wide range of users.

Use Cases:

Conducting in-depth data analysis and exploratory data visualization.
Creating comprehensive reports with detailed insights and interactive elements.

PDF (Portable Document Format):

Advantages:

Preserves formatting and layout across different devices and platforms.
Ideal for creating polished, professional reports suitable for distribution and presentation.

Use Cases:

Distributing standardized reports to stakeholders with consistent formatting.
Creating documentation or whitepapers requires a fixed layout and structure.

PowerPoint (PPT):

Advantages:

Facilitates the creation of visually engaging presentations with slides, images, and animations.
Supports storytelling and narrative-driven presentations, enhancing the impact of the insights.

Use Cases:

Presenting key findings and recommendations to executive stakeholders or clients.
Creating dynamic, interactive dashboards or data-driven presentations for meetings or workshops.

Different Methods of Report Delivery

There are various methods through which users can access BI reports. If you require immediate access to the report, you can directly export it from the tool or BI platform. Alternatively, you can opt to schedule the report, ensuring that it is delivered to you via email or message on designated days.

Scheduling:

Scheduling refers to the automated process of generating and sending reports or data extracts from a dashboard at specific intervals or times. This feature allows users to stay updated with the latest insights without having to manually access the dashboard each time. For example, a marketing manager may schedule a weekly report to be sent every Monday morning summarizing key metrics like website traffic, conversion rates, and campaign performance.

Scheduling functionality typically offers customization options to tailor the report delivery to specific user preferences and requirements. Scheduling reports in Business Intelligence (BI) platforms offers a diverse array of delivery options beyond traditional email dispatch. These options include FTP (File Transfer Protocol), collaborative platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams, and more. Users can schedule reports to be automatically emailed as attachments or embedded links, ensuring widespread accessibility and visibility. Additionally, reports can be uploaded to an FTP server at specified intervals, facilitating secure file transfer for recipients to retrieve the reports from a designated location.

Integrations with collaborative platforms enable users to schedule reports for posting to dedicated channels or chat threads, promoting real-time sharing and discussion among team members. Furthermore, some BI platforms offer APIs and webhooks for custom integrations with third-party applications, allowing users to extend the reach of BI insights to custom endpoints. This multi-channel delivery approach enhances accessibility, promotes collaboration, and accommodates diverse user preferences and organizational requirements, thereby maximizing the impact of BI initiatives.

Let's delve into some essential considerations for effective report scheduling:

Data Security and Relevance: It's essential to prioritize data security and relevance when scheduling reports. This means ensuring that reports are only accessible to relevant users and that access permissions align with organizational data policies. By controlling who can access what information, organizations can minimize the risk of unauthorized data exposure and maintain compliance with privacy regulations.
User Relevance and Subscription: Reports should only be subscribed to by users who have a genuine need for the information contained within them. This ensures that users aren't inundated with irrelevant data, which can lead to information overload and decreased productivity. By tailoring report subscriptions to specific user roles or departments, organizations can ensure that users receive only the information they need to perform their job responsibilities effectively.
Understanding User Preferences: To maximize engagement and usability, it's essential to understand users' preferences regarding data frequency and format. Some users may prefer to receive reports daily, while others may only need them on a weekly or monthly basis. Similarly, users may have preferences regarding the format of the reports they receive, such as PDF, Excel, or CSV. By accommodating these preferences, organizations can ensure that users are more likely to engage with and derive value from the scheduled reports they receive.
Dynamic Values and Matrices: Certain reporting platforms or their third-party plugins offer the functionality to incorporate matrices and dynamic content directly into both the email body and subject line. This ensures users are instantly aware of critical trends or areas requiring attention.

Imagine a marketing director receiving a scheduled report with the subject line "Campaign Click-Through Rate Down 5% This Week." This level of immediacy, achieved through dynamic values, empowers recipients to grasp key insights at a glance before even opening the report.

Exporting:

Exporting data from a BI dashboard serves as a fundamental mode of BI reporting, enabling users to extract valuable insights for further analysis, sharing, or documentation. This mode allows users to seamlessly transition from the visualization-centric environment of the dashboard to external tools or formats, facilitating deeper exploration and utilization of the data. Whether users require raw data for statistical analysis, formatted data for presentations, or archival records for documentation, exporting provides the flexibility to accommodate diverse reporting needs. By offering various export formats such as CSV, Excel, PDF, and others, BI platforms ensure compatibility with different tools and workflows, enhancing usability and accessibility for users.
For instance, analysts may export sales data to CSV format for importing into statistical software to conduct advanced analytics, while executives may prefer Excel or PDF formats for crafting comprehensive reports or presentations. Exporting thus serves as a crucial mode of BI reporting, empowering users to leverage data insights effectively across various contexts and decision-making processes within the organization.

In conclusion, BI reporting plays a vital role in driving informed decision-making and enhancing organizational performance. These reporting mechanisms transform complex data into actionable insights, enabling stakeholders to monitor key metrics, track trends, and identify opportunities for improvement. By providing structured, visually engaging reports in formats tailored to user preferences, BI reporting fosters collaboration, facilitates communication, and empowers users at all levels to make data-driven decisions.

Moreover, the integration of scheduling and exporting features ensures timely access to critical insights and facilitates deeper analysis, enabling organizations to stay agile and responsive in today's fast-paced business environment. As BI technologies continue to evolve and democratize access to data insights, the significance of BI reporting as a catalyst for organizational success and innovation will only continue to grow.

With the importance of BI reporting established, let’s explore how these needs are addressed within the Sisense platform, through both native functionality and certified extensions.

Extending BI Reporting in Sisense

Sisense continues to lead the way in empowering organizations with rich data experiences and dynamic dashboards. As part of this robust platform, Sisense offers a range of reporting options to help users distribute insights across their organizations, from simple exports to advanced scheduling.
This section outlines the key solutions available within the Sisense ecosystem, including native capabilities and certified add-ons that enhance flexibility and automation.

Sisense Built-In Email Scheduling

Out of the box, Sisense provides a native email scheduling tool that allows users to export dashboards as PDFs and send them at scheduled times. This functionality is ideal for teams needing straightforward, scheduled distribution of dashboards in a polished format.

Key strengths:

Seamless dashboard export as PDF
Simple scheduling through the Share interface
Great for standardized updates or recurring snapshots

This built-in feature is ideal for quick wins and regular stakeholder updates, especially where advanced customization is not required.

Sisense Report Manager Add-On

Sisense Report Manager is ideal for enterprise-grade scheduling, especially when delivery to external users, archiving, or governance is required. It offers a high degree of flexibility and provides a strong foundation for scaling reporting across the organization. Designed for more robust use cases than the out-of-the-box feature, it includes:

Support for PDF, Excel, CSV, and dashboard links
Time-based and event-based scheduling
Recipient targeting, including external (non-Sisense) users
Report archiving via local paths or SFTP servers
Role-based access, allowing even Viewer users to create and schedule reports
A centralized UI for managing reports, including bulk operations
Customizable email templates and multi-language support
Ability to include custom filters and set report priority

While highly capable, there are a few constraints:

Dynamic content insertion (e.g., KPIs in email subjects) requires template-level scripting
No built-in support for per-report format settings or filter presets by job
Branding, layout, or file naming customization is limited to predefined structures
Multi-tenancy and dashboard co-authoring support are partial in the current versions

Paldi Report Manager Add-On

As reporting needs grow more complex, many Sisense users seek even more granular control over report design, content personalization, and delivery flexibility. Paldi Report Manager, a certified Sisense add-on, was built to meet these needs — offering advanced features that extend the core capabilities of Sisense Report Manager in a no-code, UI-driven way.

Key advantages include:

Multi-format delivery: PDF, Excel, and CSV (individually or combined)
Flexible destinations: Email, S3 bucket, or both
Dynamic values: Inject KPIs, filter values, and dashboard metadata into email subjects, bodies, and report titles
Per-report customization: Separate filters, formats, and layout per job
No scripting required: Dynamic templates and report logic available via the UI
User-friendly installation: Seamlessly deployed and fully integrated into Sisense
Optimized for performance: Lightweight and smooth even under high concurrency

Conclusion

BI reporting remains a cornerstone of data-driven decision-making. By transforming complex information into clear, structured insights, reporting tools empower teams to monitor key metrics, identify trends, and act with confidence. Whether through static exports or automated scheduling, timely and accessible reporting helps organizations stay aligned and responsive in a fast-moving business landscape.

Within the Sisense ecosystem, a range of solutions supports this need — from native scheduling features to advanced tools like the Sisense Report Manager. For organizations requiring even greater flexibility, personalization, and control, Paldi Report Manager offers a certified extension purpose-built to elevate the reporting experience in Sisense.