Feel like you’re wading through treacle? Here are 5 reasons why bad reporting is probably the cause
You’re working harder than ever, but progress feels painfully slow. Decisions take too long. Your team can’t quite get into rhythm.
Could the anchor dragging you down be reporting? Here’s 5 reasons why it just might be.
1) Your team can’t act today if the report comes out next month
If your team can see that tomorrow’s scheduled work will deliver £8,000 in gross margin when you need £12,000 to hit your weekly profitability target, they can do something about it right now. Reschedule. Reprice. Add more. Fix it today.
If you send them a report next month saying they missed target by £16,000, what can they do? Nothing. The damage is done. Worse, it just demotivates them – they can’t see how their daily actions connect to results.
Real-time visibility builds the muscle of performance management. Six-week-old reports just damage motivation.
The reality: Research by Accenture found that companies with real-time performance visibility make decisions 5x faster than those relying on monthly reporting. The difference isn’t just speed – it’s whether you can actually do anything about it.
2) You can’t win the game if you don’t know the score
Your ops team is tracking job completion rates. Your sales team is building commission spreadsheets.
All worthy metrics. None of them tell you if you’re making money.
Because you haven’t given them the reporting that matters to you, they’re tracking what matters to them. Then you all spend Monday morning arguing over whose spreadsheet is right and why the numbers don’t add up. What a complete waste of time.
The reality: A 2023 Gartner study found that 54% of finance leaders cite “inconsistent data across departments” as their primary barrier to accurate forecasting. Without agreed key numbers and proper reporting infrastructure, you don’t get alignment – you get a mess of random, inconsistent figures that don’t reflect what you actually care about, and people deciding what “good” looks like for themselves.
Agree your key numbers. Build your reporting infrastructure. Create alignment.
3) What gets measured gets managed – and you’re measuring nothing
In 1932, Charles M. Schwab visited a struggling Bethlehem Steel plant. He asked the supervisor to write the day’s production number in chalk on the factory floor. When the night shift saw they’d been outperformed, they erased it and beat the number. The day shift returned and beat it again.
Within days, the worst plant became the best. Performance more than doubled. Nothing changed except visibility.
The lesson: Your team actually want to do well. They just don’t know what “well” looks like because you’re not showing them. Without clear visibility of margin per job, utilisation rates, or cash collection, how can they possibly know if they’re winning? Help them out – show them the score.
4) You’re firefighting instead of building
How much of your day is spent chasing information? Calling your ops manager to ask how yesterday went. Texting your sales director for pipeline updates. Asking finance for cash position. Again.
Day in, day out, you’re spending your energy trying to mitigate constant worry about performance. It’s exhausting, and it’s a complete waste of your time.
Imagine if you saw a report on yesterday’s performance when you arrived this morning. Clean data, clear numbers, delivered automatically. Now you can spend that energy on winning the next big contract, recruiting the next game-changing colleague, or executing your growth plans.
The shift: Get the data. Get it when you want it. Then focus your time on working on the business, not constantly checking what’s going on in it.
5) You think you’ve made people accountable – but without a number, you haven’t
Ask your team right now: “What number are you responsible for this month?” If they can’t answer immediately, you don’t have accountability. You have job titles and hopeful expectations.
Here’s what you’ve probably done: given responsibility for “operations performance” or “sales growth” or “customer satisfaction”. Sounds clear. It’s not. Without a specific number – one they can see, track, and be measured against – they don’t actually know what they’re accountable for.
Owning a number means living it every day, not every month. It’s in your head, instinctively, not in your notes, an email or a spreadsheet.
The evidence: Research has shown that accountability improves goal achievement by up to 65%. See the number every day. Report it every week. Watch how quickly it starts driving how you operate. That’s when accountability becomes real – when the number becomes a habit, not a monthly surprise.
Make the number theirs. Make it visible. Make it daily.
The Bottom Line
Bad reporting is the anchor holding your business back. It keeps you stuck firefighting, arguing over numbers, and discovering problems too late to fix them.
Cut the anchor loose. Get clear on what matters, measure it properly, and watch how quickly your business starts to move.
Ready to take control of your reporting?
Read our Growth Operating System guide or book a 15 minute discovery call with our team.
On a discovery call, we’ll show you:
- What your dashboards could look like
- How much time you could save
- How to get started