Report inventory: from 120 to 20 reports in five steps

The new CFO asks Controlling for a list of every report the company produces on a regular basis. The list arrives two weeks later with 120 rows: monthly reports, weekly lists, Excel extracts from the ERP, BI dashboards, three versions of the same revenue report for three division heads. In a third of the rows, the recipient has left the company. For another third, nobody knows whether the report is read at all – it goes out, and nothing comes back. That is the moment report rationalisation stops being a cost-cutting exercise and becomes a management question.

Report sprawl happens without anyone deciding it

Nobody decided on 120 reports. Each one had an occasion: a project, a stock shortage, a board question, a new division head with habits of his own. The occasion passed; the report stayed. Ossola-Haring, Schlageter and Schöning describe the mechanism: metrics produced for a long time derive their right to exist solely from their history (Ossola-Haring et al. 2019, p. 93). Add the asymmetry of tidying up: cancelling a report might annoy someone; keeping it annoys nobody. So everything stays.

What the sprawl costs is rarely calculated, because the cost is spread across many desks. The arithmetic is simple: 120 reports at three hours a month each for preparation, reconciliation and distribution – conservative for manual Excel extracts from several systems – makes 360 hours a month and around 4,300 hours a year, a good two full-time positions. At a fully loaded rate you arrive at roughly TCHF 500 a year – for reports of which, in our experience, a fifth get read and a tenth are used for a decision. Ossola-Haring et al. demand the same business case for a reporting system as for a capital investment: the gain in steering capability has to justify the cost (2019, p. 96). For most of the 120 reports, nobody has ever done that calculation.

Step 1: The inventory

The first step is unglamorous and the most important: a list. Not from memory, but from the systems – distribution lists, folders, BI workspaces, scheduled e-mail deliveries. For each report we record name, recipients, producer, frequency, effort per issue and last access. The last column is the decisive one. BI tools provide it from usage logs; for Excel reports, the file's last-modified date helps, or a plain question to the recipient: "When did you last use something from this report?"

Inventory template with three sample rows
Report	Recipients	Producer	Frequency	Effort h/issue	Last access	Purpose / decision
Revenue by region (Excel)	Executive board, 3 division heads	Controlling	monthly	4	last month	regional budgets, sales management
Stock cover (days)	Head of logistics	Planning	weekly	2	this week	reorder, stock target
Project hours by cost centre	former division head	Controlling	monthly	3	14 months ago	open

Seven columns are enough. The 'last access' column exposes the zombie reports; the 'purpose / decision' column stays empty for a large share at first – and that is exactly where step 2 begins.

The inventory takes two to five days. It is the only phase that is legwork; everything after it is judgement.

Step 2: The purpose question for every report

For every report we ask the same question in the same form: What are these figures meant to say? What is the point of them? And behind it the question that makes a report a management instrument at all: Which decision would be taken differently if these figures came out differently? Where there is no answer, we write "open" – not "information", because information without a decision is why the list has 120 rows.

The answers surprise. The revenue report by region is read, but nobody decides anything with it; regional budgets are set in autumn from a different analysis. The stock-cover list, an unremarkable Excel file, triggers reorders every week. The purpose question also gives every report a cadence: how often does someone look at it, and how often would they need to? A report produced monthly and read quarterly has the wrong frequency – or no purpose.

Step 3: The supply, demand and need test

With purpose and decision recorded, the stock can be sorted. Ossola-Haring et al. use three circles: supply (technically available), demand (wanted by management) and need (required for steering). Only the intersection of all three is the target; each other area has its own consequence (Ossola-Haring et al. 2019, pp. 94 f.). Gladen calls the same condition "scarcity amid abundance": data supply, demand and information need do not coincide (Gladen 2014, p. 7). Applied to the inventory:

Supply only: The report exists because it was once built. No recipient, no decision. These are the zombie reports – they get cancelled.
Supply and demand, but no need: Wanted and read, but carrying no decision. The most critical case, because it feels good. This calls for a conversation with the recipient.
Need without supply: A decision is pending, the figure is missing. The inventory exposes this gap as a by-product – which is why at the end one or two reports are built new as well.

Gladen sets the standard here: the objective information need cannot be obtained by asking the recipients; it can only be derived from the problems to be solved (ibid.). Ask recipients whether they want to keep the report and you get 120 yeses. Ask which decision they take with it and you get an honest list.

Step 4: Consolidate by report type and notation

Some of the 120 reports are not superfluous but duplicated: the same revenue report in three versions for three division heads, the same cost-centre analysis with and without prior year, a dashboard and an Excel file with identical content because one recipient "prefers Excel". Eiduzzis shows the scale: several hundred standard reports were cut to a substantially smaller number with a notation concept, because many existed two and three times over for a single filter value (Eiduzzis in Mehlfeld et al. 2018, pp. 122 ff.).

We consolidate in two directions. First by report type: glasses (dashboard, overview for the executive board), page (report, analysis for the division head) and hammer (working report, operational tool for the back office). Every remaining report gets exactly one of these roles; three revenue reports for three division heads become one page with one filter. Second by notation: a concept along the lines of IBCS® – prior year – actual – budget, time running left to right, variance instead of value, a ±5 % threshold for comments – makes reports equally readable and therefore mergeable; two layouts become one report with two views. How such a concept is built is described in our article on IBCS.

Of 120 reports, 20 remain as stand-alone reports. 35 are absorbed into those 20, 45 are cancelled outright, 20 are archived and produced only on request. The figures are a typical picture from reviews, not a single case.

Step 5: Cancel with notice

The last step fails most often – not on the analysis, but on nerve. That is why we never cancel quietly and never by survey, but with notice: the report will be switched off on a named date. Recipients get a short message with the reason – no decision, no access for over a year, content contained in report X – and one sentence: whoever misses it within the next 30 days, speak up. The 30-day rule reverses the burden of proof. Controlling no longer has to prove a report is superfluous; the recipient has to show they need it – by needing it.

What happens in those 30 days is the same every time: for one or two reports someone speaks up with a concrete occasion, and the report comes back – now with purpose and decision on the list. For all the others, nobody does. Demand without need gets an intermediate stage, archiving: no longer produced, definition documented, available on request. Hardly any is ever requested.

Fewer reports is not an end in itself

The headline names a number, and the number is not the point. From 120 to 20 is a typical result, but 20 reports nobody needs for a decision would be just as expensive as 120. The goal of the inventory is one decision per report – the smaller number follows on its own. That is the logic of our framework From decision to metric: decision → question → metric → data → report → effect → review. The inventory is the review step, applied backwards to a stock that came into being without the steps before it.

Cindi Howson describes where a report's relevance comes from: the most successful BI applications in her study were not built from users' requirement lists, but by BI experts observing users' daily work, decisions and incentives and deducing the need from that (Howson 2014, p. 191). A report's value shows in everyday decision-making, not in the distribution list. Watch which page is opened in the management meeting when an action is agreed, and you know which 20 reports stay.

From practice

At a services group with several companies, I took inventory of the existing reports before the new data platform was built: Excel reports from eight source systems, each company's set slightly different from the next. Every report faced the purpose question: What are these figures meant to say, and what is the point of them? A large share showed the same metrics in different layouts – with a shared notation concept they became a handful of reports with a company filter. The rest we switched off with notice, 30 days, replies to me. One reply came, about an operational working report, which we reinstated. A fraction of the original stock made it onto the new platform, and every report had an entry in the "decision" column.

The sentence that justifies the whole inventory was written by Ossola-Haring et al.: whatever reporting is possible gets produced – and the usage afterwards is then taken as confirmation that the investment was necessary (Ossola-Haring et al. 2019, p. 96). The circle only breaks if someone breaks it. The authors' cost-benefit test is the inventory from step 1 with one column for effort and one for decision (2019, pp. 95 f.). From review practice comes the harder version: reports whose data users do not pay attention to are thrown out – and the access log, not a survey, shows whether they do.

What you can do tomorrow

Get the list – not from memory, but from distribution lists, folders and BI workspaces, with last access. Put the purpose question and the decision question to every report and leave the column empty where no answer comes. After one day you have the most honest view of your reporting in years. Then pick five reports with an empty column and switch them off with notice: 30 days, whoever misses it speaks up.

If you would like an outside view, that is the core of our project review: a few days, fixed price, a written second opinion with a cut list. We take inventory, go through the purpose question with the recipients, and deliver a list that says for each report: keep, merge, cancel or archive – with reasoning and effort. What remains, we bring onto a shared notation in a staged reporting build.

Sources

Ossola-Haring, C., Schlageter, A., Schöning, S. (2019): 11 Irrtümer über Kennzahlen. Mit den richtigen Erkenntnissen führen. Springer Gabler.
Gladen, W. (2014): Performance Measurement. Controlling mit Kennzahlen. 6th edition, Springer Gabler.
Mehlfeld, T., Schneider, C., Stahl, K.-U., Wiener, A. (eds.) (2018): Reporting- und Business-Intelligence-Werkzeuge für den Controller. Grundlagen und praktische Tipps von Anwendern, Beratern und Herstellern – including Eiduzzis: Reporting-Effizienz durch Notation, pp. 122 ff.
Howson, C. (2014): Successful Business Intelligence. Unlock the Value of BI & Big Data. 2nd edition, McGraw-Hill.