If your teams are still scanning reports manually to spot issues, inefficiencies, or trends, you’re missing out on your Analytics Tools’ real power. Instead of looking at full reports every day, why not focus only on what matters most?
Exception Reporting – identify what needs attention
Rather than viewing entire financial reports, exception-based reporting highlights anomalies, risks, or deviations. Practical examples are where cash flow falls below a certain threshold; a cost centre exceeds its allocated budget by more than 5 %; or customers have outstanding invoices beyond 60 days.
Exception Reporting is also very relevant to Supply Chain, Sales and Operations – out-of-stock alerts, supplier delivery delays, slow-moving inventory or customer insights such as high-value customers without purchases in the last 3-6 months, could help you proactively address issues before they become too big to manage.
HR exceptions such as a sudden increase in employee turnover, unplanned absenteeism, or overtime spikes will help you take immediate action.
Managing KPIs, not just reporting them
- Exception reporting allows you to track KPIs and get alerts when they deviate from expectations.
- Proactive insights mean you don’t need to wait until month-end to act.
How could you take action?
- Identify 3-5 critical KPIs that should trigger alerts.
- Set up automated notifications in your Analytics Tools for key business thresholds.
- Ensure decision-makers have dashboard views focused on action, not just numbers.
Next week, we will examine decision-making dashboards, specifically how to build dashboards that drive business actions instead of just displaying data.
