HR reporting is a key process that begins with the accurate recording, processing, and secure storage of confidential HR data within your organization. The quality, reliability, and integrity of HR data within a company’s business system environment is a key component producing accurate and on-time reports which may be generated as valuable information for decision-making and strategic HR planning within your company.
HR management and payroll administrators generally are responsible for producing a wide range of reports on a weekly, monthly, or on-demand basis, and rely on a comprehensive and integrated system with strong reporting tools and functionality to achieve these results.
Why HR Reporting Is A Daunting Task?
HR reporting within many organizations can be a daunting task, or perhaps even a dreaded exercise. Each time that management requests a new report, or a regularly report is prepared, it can be another overwhelming, disorganized, time-consuming project.
It doesn’t have to be.
Many of the HR report writing challenges stem from the difficulty with or lack of knowledge about using the report writing tools available in the customer’s HRIS. While some of these reporting tools are more user-friendly than others, the end user must have a good understanding of the system’s database structure and the relationship between the fields and tables. Users select the appropriate employee records and must then be able to identify, format, and prepare the arrangement of the data fields for the report.
The end user must have the ability to easily, properly sort records, group like records, and create totals for any numeric data. If those functionalities are easily understood by the end user, preparing reports is streamlined and easy.
Why One Should Learn the Reporting Tools Available?
Investing time to work with your HRIS vendor to train your end users will pay back dividends. By learning how to use the report writing tools, your organization can take full advantage of what they offer, appreciate the time that they save, and rely upon their accuracy. Too often, the end users within organizations, faced with learning new reporting tools, respond with something like “If we can export that data to Excel, we can just create the report from there.” Sound familiar?
Dozens of extra hours each month are spent by HRIS customers within the comforts of Excel, manually creating spreadsheet-driven reports using raw data exported from these HR systems, while the report writing tools are left underutilized. While these other, familiar tools, including Excel, certainly have their purpose, too often they are used as a “safe haven” for end users that haven’t taken the time to learn the use of their system’s report writing tools. Working with your provider to train end-users allows you to take full advantage of the time and money-saving capability that these tools may provide.
Using Report Writing = Leveraging the Entire HRIS Solution
One of the most important components of complete, comprehensive reporting is the extent to which the system’s HRIS functionality is actually utilized and the HR data is populated. Once your organization has built an accurate database, you can take full advantage of reporting from within your HRIS. Making the investment in time, training, and a little patience will allow you to learn the full use and take advantage of your report writing tools. By using your entire system to its fullest, you can help it best help you.
StarGarden’s HCM 5.0 is a completely integrated HR system that allows easy input of data and offers user-friendly report generation capabilities. Plus, StarGarden offers on-site training for end-users, both during initial implementation and for ongoing continuing education. Contact StarGarden today to find out how you can try a free demo of our HRIS software and see for yourself how easy it can be.
