Reporting applications, so you stop rebuilding the same report every month
If producing a client or board report means opening last month’s workbook, pasting in new data, fixing what broke and emailing the file, the report is not the problem. The distribution is. Publish it once as a reporting application and the recipients always open the current version.
The monthly reporting cycle, and what it costs
Reports built in Excel are usually accurate. What they are not is repeatable at scale, and the effort lands in the same week every month.
- Each client or department gets an individually prepared workbook
- Preparation is manual, and the hours scale with the number of recipients
- You cannot be sure everyone has a compatible version of Excel
- Once it is sent, you no longer control who sees it or what they change
- Every correction means resending, and now several versions are in circulation
- One application serves every recipient, filtered to what each may see
- New data is uploaded, not re-formatted into a fresh copy
- It opens in a browser, so no version of Excel is required at the far end
- Access is by user and group, and it can be revoked
- A correction is a re-upload, and everyone is immediately on the current figures
What a reporting application is made of
The analysis stays where it was written. What changes is how people reach it.
Your aggregation, not a query builder
XLOOKUP, FILTER, SUMIFS, dynamic arrays and the rest keep working, so the logic that turns raw rows into the numbers you report is the logic you already wrote and can still audit.
Charts that came from the workbook
Excel charts become interactive web visualisations rather than pasted images, so a figure that changes when the data changes stays correct instead of quietly going stale.
Who sees which numbers
Users and groups control access down to the data set, so a client portal can show each customer their own figures from the same application, and staff can see across all of them.
Three of them, running right now
Built from ordinary workbooks. Open any of them and change the filters.
Aggregation and charting across collected records, not a static sheet of last month’s numbers.
Open the live appOperational figures pulled together into one view, built from the workbook that already calculated them.
Open the live appA map control fed by latitude and longitude columns, animated across a timeline of named storms.
Open the live appMore live applications are in the gallery.
A customer-facing reporting portal
Priority Management Group provides claim management and detailed reporting to health care organisations, collecting data from operators and call centres and producing monthly reports for every client.
Hundreds of man-hours a cycle
Report preparation was manual and Excel-based. It gave them flexibility, and it cost hundreds of hours to produce individual reports across their client base every month.
Distribution was the harder problem
They could not guarantee clients had the right version of Excel, could not secure a report once it had been sent, and every small change spawned another version of the same report.
What replaced it
A customer-facing portal, with a hierarchy of users and groups setting what clients and staff can view and edit, and updates re-uploaded rather than emailed.
New Jersey City University did something similar with a decade of enrollment data across 41 undergraduate and 27 graduate programmes, turning spreadsheets into interactive dashboards for the people making budget decisions.
Publish the report instead of sending it
Start free with the workbook you rebuild every month, or tell us how many recipients there are and who is allowed to see what, and we will tell you what it would take.