Create and present business reports effectively using Zoho Show - Part 2

Creating business reports is a regular task for many professionals, but it doesn’t have to be a tedious chore. Meet Sophia, a seasoned marketer who prepares monthly business reports for internal stakeholders and clients. Her reports are essential to help her colleagues make data-driven and informed decisions, but the process of creating reports was anything but efficient.

There are several factors that contribute to creating business reports efficiently. In our previous blog post, we saw the 3 Cs of creating effective business reports with Show. In continuation, let's take a look at the necessary key features to create insightful reports.

Sophia's challenges in creating business reports

Before discovering Zoho Show, Sophia encountered several common pain points: 

Designing slides: Creating multiple reports meant designing slides from scratch and spending hours formatting slides and tweaking visual elements to align with the brand.

Uploading visuals: She constantly juggles tabs to find the right visuals for her presentation, resulting in an elaborate process of searching and downloading files, and uploading them.

Manual data entry: Data is an essential part of her reports, but Sophia constantly had to switch between spreadsheets and dashboards and manually enter these numbers into her slides, which took hours and was also error prone and affected business decisions.

Visualizing data: Data visualization tools play an important part in financial reporting and presentations. She used to create charts and graphs with separate tools and then upload them to the slides, which slowed down her process and shifted her focus.

Ineffective collaboration: Her previous presentation software did not support asynchronous or real-time collaboration. Feedback was scattered across emails and chat apps, and teammates often struggled to identify the latest version of the report.

Lack of integrations: Most of her report creation process was manual, as there was a lack of integrated tools to automate her workflows and generate reports. She had to manually source data for sales reports, campaign reports, and project update reports.

Creating multiple versions: One of the most redundant and time-consuming tasks was to create multiple versions tailored to different audiences. Sophia created separate decks for internal teams, partners, and clients, which was repetitive and inefficient.

Remote presentation: Most of her team and clients are scattered across the globe and different time zones. She had to rely on external tools to present her slides, leading to inconsistent experiences and extra steps.

With so many challenges disrupting her workflow, Sophia began looking for a tool that could do more than just help with creating reports and inputting data. She needed a solution that could streamline her manual processes and transform how she collaborated with her team.

Discovering Zoho Show: A game-changer for business reports

Zoho Show isn’t just a presentation design tool: it’s a collaborative tool built for modern teams to connect and deliver presentations from anywhere. Here’s how it helped Sophia create and deliver reports effortlessly.

Save time with Library

With Library, Sophia stores all the brand templates, slides, and fonts in one place. Whether she is creating reports for her organization or clients, she can quickly reuse and customize her existing templates, slides, and brand fonts without having to create them from scratch.

Auto-sync values with spreadsheet integration

She records crucial business data like sales revenue numbers, customer acquisition rate, and other metrics in spreadsheets. Rather than copying and pasting these values, she now extracts them from the spreadsheet and inserts them straight to the slide. Any edits made to the master data will automatically be synced and updated in the slide.

Keep slides up-to-date with Data Fields

Since she creates reports every month for multiple clients, Sophia uses Data Fields to store values and create dynamic placeholders for details such as the client name, business address, and date. With data fields, she can automatically extract values from her spreadsheet, sync values across slides, and keep her slides up-to-date.

Automate workflows with integrations

With integration platforms like Zoho Flow and Zapier, she connects Zoho Show with tools like Zoho Campaigns and Zoho CRM to automate workflows. Reports are now generated automatically based on triggers, which saves hours of manual work.

Record and share with narration

In scenarios where she is unable to present Live, she uses audio and video recording to narrate her reports and shares them as self-running presentations. This helps communicate complex insights accurately when explanation is necessary.

Collaborate seamlessly with secure sharing

With the internal and external sharing link, she can now share the report with her team members and clients for a centralized and streamlined feedback. She can also track changes and control who can view, comment, edit, or share the presentation to ensure smooth collaboration.

Create tailored versions with custom slideshows

Sophia now creates custom slideshows of a single deck by choosing only the necessary slides and creating tailored versions for her stakeholders, sales team, and clients without duplicating her report.

Broadcast slides live across the globe

She no longer uses third-party communication tools for real-time presentations. With the built-in Broadcast feature, she now presents directly from Zoho Show to remote teams by sharing the broadcast link or inviting them as presenters or participants.

Wrapping up!

With Zoho Show, Sophia now creates streamlined and automated business reports in a fraction of the time. She focuses more on analysis and storytelling, and less on formatting, data input, and version control. With efficient collaboration, secure storage, and restricted access levels, business report-creation is no longer a tedious and tiresome process.

Like Sophia, if you’re also facing challenges like manual effort, version confusion, and scattered tools, then Zoho Show is the tool for you.

Sign up for free and try our Android and iOS apps to create reports on the go!