Sales reports that took a whole day to produce

The problem

Management wanted to know, every week, how sales were going by product and by agent. The reports were made by hand: someone gathered data from invoicing, from stock and from files sent in by agents, then pasted it all into a spreadsheet. It took a whole day, it had errors, and by the time it reached management the figures were already out of date.

The proposed solution

I didn’t propose a fancier spreadsheet, but getting rid of the manual work. The data already existed in the company’s systems, so it only had to be brought into one place and shown clearly. I proposed a simple web dashboard with up-to-date figures, which management opens whenever they need it.

What I delivered

• A web dashboard with sales by product, customer and agent, updated automatically from the existing systems.
• Simple filters by period, region and category, so everyone sees what interests them without asking for a new report.
• Role-based access: management sees everything, and each agent sees only their own figures.
• Excel export, for anyone who wants to process the data further, and a summary sent automatically by email on Monday morning.
• Run in parallel with the old reports for a few weeks, so the team could check that the figures matched.

The benefit afterwards

The reports no longer take a day of work, and the figures are up to date and free of copy-paste errors. Management makes decisions on fresh data, for example which products to order more of or which regions need attention, and the person who used to make the reports now spends their time on analysis, not on copying tables.