Export, paste, pivot, repeat
Every Monday morning, the operations manager or the owner's right hand exports last week's jobs from the MIS, pastes them into the report spreadsheet, fixes the columns that moved since the last software update, refreshes the pivot tables and emails the result to the directors. Sales by rep, orders taken, jobs invoiced, work in progress, estimates sent. It takes most of the morning, and it is out of date by Wednesday.
When a director asks a new question, such as how much of last month's work was digital against litho, the answer is 'I will have a look', and it arrives the following week, if at all.
The data is there, the view is not
Print MIS systems hold a great deal of useful data: estimates, orders, jobs, costs, invoices, customers. Their built-in reports often reflect what the software supplier thought printers wanted, not what your directors ask.
- Built-in reports do not match the way you think about your business.
- Some numbers live in the MIS and others in the accounts package, so they have to be combined by hand.
- Exports change format when the software is updated.
- Reports are snapshots emailed as attachments, so different people look at different versions.
- Only one person knows how the spreadsheet works.
The cost of a weekly spreadsheet
The obvious cost is the time spent building it. The more important cost is decisions made late or without data: a slowdown in estimates sent that is only noticed a month later, a customer whose orders have quietly dropped, work in progress building up because invoicing is behind. And because the spreadsheet is fragile, numbers are occasionally wrong, which erodes trust in all of them.
A reporting layer on your own data
- We connect to your MIS, through its API or database where it allows, and to your accounts package, such as Xero or Sage.
- Data is copied into a reporting store on a schedule, so reports do not slow down the MIS during the working day.
- We agree definitions with you, such as what counts as an order, when a job is work in progress and how margin is calculated, and build them once.
- Dashboards show the views your directors use: sales by rep and customer, estimates and conversion, work in progress, invoiced sales, press and finishing utilisation if that data exists, and outstanding debt.
- A Monday summary is emailed automatically, with links to the live dashboard for anyone who wants to look further.
- New questions become new views, answered from the same data rather than a new spreadsheet.
| Report | Built by hand from | Built automatically from |
|---|---|---|
| Sales by rep | MIS export | MIS orders and invoices |
| Work in progress | Job list and guesswork | Job status and costs |
| Estimate conversion | Not done | Estimates and orders |
| Debtors | Accounts package | Accounts package via API |
We use tools like Power BI or Looker Studio where they suit you, or a simple web dashboard, so the reports sit somewhere your team already goes.
Monday without the spreadsheet
The report is waiting when the directors arrive, with numbers everyone agrees on because the definitions are fixed. The person who used to build it spends Monday on something else. Questions get answered in days, not weeks. And trends, like a falling conversion rate or a customer drifting away, are visible early enough to act on.
Is Monday a spreadsheet day?
- Someone spends hours each week rebuilding reports from exports.
- MIS and accounts numbers are combined by hand.
- Directors look at different versions of the same report.
- New questions take weeks to answer.
- The report spreadsheet breaks after software updates.