9 Business Reports You Should Be Generating Automatically

Manual reporting is one of those tasks that feels productive but delivers almost no strategic value. You are not analyzing data when you spend two hours pulling numbers from three different platforms into a spreadsheet. You are doing data entry with extra steps. The analysis happens in the five minutes after the report is assembled, which means 95% of the effort is wasted on assembly.

Automated reporting flips that ratio. The assembly happens in the background, and you spend your time on the insights. Here are nine reports that every growing business should automate, along with the data sources and delivery methods that make each one work.

Organize your automated reports by cadence: daily for operations, weekly for management, monthly for strategy

Daily Reports

1. Daily Sales Summary. This is your morning pulse check. Automate a report that pulls total orders, revenue, average order value, and top-selling products from the previous day. Deliver it to Slack or email at 7 AM so leadership starts the day informed. Data sources include Shopify or your e-commerce platform, plus QuickBooks for payment reconciliation.

2. Order Exception Report. Flag orders that need human attention: failed payments, address validation errors, items out of stock after ordering, or orders exceeding a value threshold that requires approval. Without this report, exceptions sit in a queue until someone stumbles onto them. Automate it with webhook triggers and conditional routing in Make.com.

3. Inventory Alert Report. Stock levels change constantly. Automate a daily alert for any SKU that drops below its reorder point, is approaching zero, or has excess stock that needs promotional attention. Combine data from your inventory sync system and warehouse management tool to get a single view.

Weekly Reports

4. Fulfillment Performance Report. Track average time from order placement to shipment, shipping carrier performance, delivery exception rates, and return initiation volume. This report helps you catch fulfillment bottlenecks before they become customer service crises. Pull data from ShipStation, your 3PL, and return management tools.

5. Cash Flow Snapshot. Automate a weekly view of accounts receivable aging, accounts payable due, bank balances, and projected cash position. This is especially critical for wholesale and distribution businesses where payment terms create cash flow gaps. Your accounting platform is the primary source, enriched with pending order data from your sales channels.

6. Customer Activity Digest. Summarize new customer signups, repeat purchase rates, support ticket volume, and NPS or satisfaction scores. This report connects your CRM, help desk, and e-commerce data into a single customer health view. Automate delivery to your customer success team every Monday morning.

Monthly Reports

7. Profit and Loss by Channel. Most businesses know their total revenue but cannot tell you the profitability of each sales channel after accounting for platform fees, shipping costs, returns, and customer acquisition costs. Automate this by pulling data from your accounting software, ad platforms, and fulfillment systems into a consolidated dashboard. This is the report that changes how you allocate your marketing budget.

8. Vendor Scorecard. If you work with suppliers, automate a monthly scorecard tracking on-time delivery rate, order accuracy, lead times, and pricing competitiveness. Feed this data from your order-to-cash system and purchase order records. Share it directly with vendors to drive accountability and negotiate better terms.

9. Automation ROI Report. This is the meta-report: how much time and money are your automations saving? Track execution counts, error rates, estimated hours saved, and cost avoidance. Pull data from your Make.com or Zapier analytics dashboards. This report justifies continued investment and identifies workflows that need attention. Pair it with our quarterly automation review checklist for maximum impact.

Data flows from source systems through your automation platform into dashboards and scheduled deliveries

Implementation Tips

Start with the daily sales summary. It is the easiest to build, delivers immediate value, and builds momentum for the rest. Use Google Sheets as your initial dashboard layer since it is free, flexible, and connects easily to automation platforms. Graduate to Looker Studio or Power BI once your data volume justifies it.

A report that arrives automatically every morning is worth ten times more than a better report that requires someone to remember to build it.

For each report, define three things before you build: who receives it, what decisions it informs, and what action the recipient should take based on the data. If you cannot answer those questions, the report is not worth automating. Use our cost calculator to quantify how much time you are currently spending on manual reporting.