Reporting Online

While e-reporting can cut customer service costs, reduce the paperwork shuffle, and improve budgeting and planning, many e-reporting projects fail because they don’t meet end users’ needs.

Want to get reports to key people faster? Or bill a customer more quickly? How about speed up reimbursements for travel expenses? Would you like to give employees the ability to create their own reports or let them answer their own questions about their medical coverage? When you look at all the potential benefits of electronic reporting, it’s hard to imagine why any company wouldn’t want to develop this capability.

Not surprisingly, e-reporting software is a hot market with annual growth expectations of about 30 percent. "The amount of money being spent to develop this software capability, which is generically referred to as integrated document archive and retrieval systems [IDARS], is projected to increase from about $1 billion this year to $2.3 billion by 2003," says James W. Lundy, research director at Gartner Inc., a market research and advisory firm in Stamford, Conn. "However, it will likely take until 2008 to make something like e-billing mainstream. Institutions have to market it to customers. There’s not a lot of demand out there to receive, for example, an e-bill from a retailer," he says.

What’s the number one e-reporting benefit for companies? Speed, according to Lundy. The increasing use of Web-enabled technology for electronic dissemination of everything from financial reports to expense reports to customer bills is saving time and money while improving information flow throughout the organization.

"Companies using e-reporting capabilities can reap significant savings by reducing or eliminating the reports that their IT department used to have to build for their employees," says Henry Morris, vice president for data warehousing and knowledge management research at IDC, a global technology industry research firm in Framingham, Mass. "With reports incorporated into the Web, delivery is faster and simpler. And users have a cache of these reports that are readily available to them, so they can search for the reports they want, whereas with a paper-based reporting system, finding an old report you wanted to reference was usually more problematic," he says.

Studies indicate that e-reporting can dramatically reduce the time and money spent on creating paper reports. "One expense report study looked at 85 companies that had implemented e-expense reporting capabilities. It concluded that it used to take an employee about one hour to fill out, print and send an expense report — at a cost of about $36. But with e-expense reporting, the time to produce the report was reduced to about 15 minutes, and the cost was reduced to about $8," says Elizabeth A. Ireland, vice president of marketing at Extensity Inc., a work force optimization solution provider in Emeryville, Calif. She says that the same study revealed that the number of calls into the A/P department from employees inquiring about the status of their reimbursements was cut in half with Web-based expense reporting.

The e-reporting format also lends itself to better analysis of data. "It gives users the opportunity to look at trend analyses over time, as opposed to having to flip through a three-ring binder for information," says Lundy. "I think you’ll also see the emergence of a common repository — like an online library type of reporting service — for users to access in the not-too-distant future."

That high availability of information, along with data customization for different users, cuts down the number of meetings needed to bring everyone up to speed about a project. With e-reporting, they’re automatically updated. "It allows people to spend less time in meetings, so they can spend more time on analyzing the information in the reports," says Sandra Gault, vice president of marketing at Performaworks Inc., an application service provider in Raleigh, N.C.

Does the advent of e-reporting mean the paper shuffle is coming to an end? Will companies stop using printers? "E-reporting software vendors talk about savings of 60 percent or more just on printing costs, but even at companies that have e-reporting, the reports are still being printed out by the end users," Lundy says. "People tend to print out the report, read it, then toss it because they know they have the information on their computer. So the idea that most companies are moving toward a purely paperless system isn’t really true, and the saving on paper and printing costs isn’t as substantial as you might think." He adds that huge savings are possible through better print management and by buying printing on a cost-per-copy basis instead of buying a whole new fleet of printing machines.