It’s common for people to feel overwhelmed by the prospect of business reporting and struggle to find time for it!
We’re often told in business that we should be generating and reviewing reports. But what data should be reviewed, by whom and how often? And why? Commonly, the answer is to cover what’s needed for tax and HR-related compliance or maybe for the auditors for accreditation.
In our experience, the enormous internal benefits of tracking and recording successes and areas of need are rarely realised.
Is compliance the end of the story?
We’ve worked with healthcare practices that had previously focused on reporting solely for compliance – paying taxes, ensuring insurance information was up to date, generating data for lenders when seeking finance, etc.
Whilst these are all good reasons to compile performance data, from a management perspective more broadly, reporting has amazing power in addition to financial analysis, facilitating insights into other facets of your practice’s performance!
For example, by researching and reporting on the existing organisation-wide state of affairs for one of our clients and identifying where attention was needed accordingly, we were able to help them increase their profit by 300% over a year. This was a fantastic result for their bottom line, but what the accountant and ATO didn’t see was that the implemented changes also resulted in engaged clients and motivated staff, who contributed a great deal to that 300% increase, plus enhanced the culture of the practice, with lots of benefits rippling out!
Who needs to receive what reports?
We know some of the ‘Why’ of reporting, including identifying changes in financial performance over time, improved productivity, staff morale and motivation, all of which lead to growth. But who should the reports and information generated go to? Standard reporting has evolved to managers, directors or the board. However, another approach is to report to those directly positioned to action the information…
You’ll have seen this happening across organisations in lots of situations; medical specialists report back to the GP on a patient’s condition, and vice versa, organisations report to banks and insurance companies to get their risk level updated, and so on.
Could you apply this approach in your practice? For example, would a receptionist having access to detailed information about clients’ satisfaction levels and feedback potentially improve the service they provide?
This was one of the questions we asked our client. The resultant customer feedback reporting led to the admin team having a solid understanding of the drivers of client satisfaction - they knew the service aspects to continue and boost and those to refine.
It’s important to note that this wasn’t overly complicated – no algorithms or complex calculations were performed. The measure’s simplicity meant that it could be captured quickly and readily actioned. Complicated questions sometimes require detailed reporting, but the most effective solutions are often the simple ones.
Getting practical and actionable reports
While customer feedback reporting wasn’t the only tool used to achieve team satisfaction and financial performance for this client, this approach results in valuable and actionable reports.
Key steps for your practice:
Determine the areas where you need information – what are the questions or issues? There’s no value in generating reports that nobody looks at.
Establish the relevant sources of information and reporting method/s. For example, data from your medical software, accounting software, patient surveys, website hits, etc. Your analysis may involve a combination of sources.
Bring your team along for the ride, including ensuring they understand what you’re looking to achieve. Their buy-in will mean that the tracking and reporting aren’t seen as a criticism of their performance but about finding out what, as an organisation, you’re doing well and what you can do better.
Train relevant team members on how to review and appropriately action the information. This could be written up as a procedure - what, depending on the results, they need to do and how to do it.
Consolidate and, where possible, automate the reporting process so that your reports are efficient and effective in an ongoing manner and reporting isn’t a drain on resources.
Remember that the above method can be used to review any aspect of business performance, not just financials. Other examples include:
How effective was your last client newsletter?
How much accrued annual leave do your team members have?
Which vaccines are you using, and which are being thrown out because they expire?
What is the conversion rate from your Google Ads campaign?
Is the number of times a particular item is billed offsetting the repayment on a particular piece of equipment?
Just ensure the data obtained gets to the right person or people to make decisions and act!
The Augmentum team provides a broad range of consultancy and management services, supporting healthcare business owners and decision-makers in many key areas, such as strategy development and action planning, building effective foundations and teams, keeping your finger on the pulse, and driving growth and success.
Need some help or advice…? Get in touch if you’d like support with setting up relevant reporting, rectifying performance challenges or improving performance in your organisation!
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