By In my career, I’ve facilitated report trainings for both employees and clients, large and small groups (and one-on-ones), teaching in lecture-style as well as hands-on. I’ve taught from basic 101 reports to Crystal Reports for System Administrators, and everything in between. Prior to working for RMIS vendors, I also had the pleasure of working as an Information Manager – and had to create and generate reports to everyone from location managers to CFOs to Brokers and Actuarials. So I know a few things about reports and reporting needs. This post will be about a few of my favorite standard reports, concluding with a PSA on report hygiene. I’ll save my deeper dive on report hygiene for next week because it deserves a lot more attention than it gets. Before I dive into a lovely song parody, let me help you establish your foundation to success when it comes to reports.
- Know your audience
- Know your frequency
- Know your intended message/action
Knowing the answers those fundamentals will drive the direction you take (e.g. type of report, dashboard, email that you create).
Know your audience
Why is this important? If someone has risk management and insurance experience, you may want to relay information differently than someone with no background in insurance. The volume of emails that a CFO or a division leader gets impacts how you want to deliver information. If your intended audience prefers visual imagery, you may want to choose a dashboard or a report with graphic (remember a picture is worth 1,000 words).
Know your frequency
Unless you have high volume of claims, sending reports out monthly typically is enough to keep the target audience’s attention span. With higher claim activity, you may want to choose weekly. The harsh reality on weekly and daily emails with your report data is that they get lost in the blackhole of the inbox. Which leads to the big driver…what do you want people to do with the information provided.
Know your intended message/action
You’ll hear many sales people in your demo say that a dashboard should tell a story and drive behavior. Same is true for reports (note to the reader – while you may think of them as the same, typically reports are built with a different software than dashboard widgets and reports convey more detailed information than the “pops”/KPIs that you’ll find on dashboard widgets). Ultimately you’re conveying information (e.g., things are good, same or worse to last year).
Reports
Here are my go to reports. Every system will have these and they’re good for getting the job done. They’re the Volvo of RMIS reports.
One line claim detail – perfect for weekly ‘here are your new claims’
Financial summary or detail – 2 points in time – I’ll typically run as a cross check between this month and last month, this year and last year and this quarter to last quarter. The benefit of using the same report is your end user is (or will become) comfortable with the data elements and how to interpret what they’re seeing
Triangle – I love triangles! They have a ton of info. I run once to see if the data is clean about a month before sending out to my big financial number lovers (captive managers, actuarials and accounting for reserving). This is an annual report in my mind (unless you’ve got some high volume)
Claim summary – always by coverage and then by cause code for my safety guys; by location for my divisions/entities
My next favorites are open and close claim reserve analysis to check on reserving practices.
Now…there is a lot you can do with just those reports, but those are a good foundation. Of course you can build your own, but I like to start with what the system gives you and then get feedback from the field and recipients to see if they like, want more or are filing in a trash can.
Report Hygiene
Your report module is going to get messy! EVERY client has this problem! At the beginning of each training I talk about naming conventions, tagging reports and putting reports in folder. I gently remind folks at the end of each training of these best practices. But inevitably there is a pile-up of ‘Test’, ‘Test1’, ‘Test for Barry’ etc. reports that clog things up and probably should have been deleted, but weren’t. I’ll dive more into this but just know if you have a system for years (which every RMIS vendor wants), unless practicing good report hygiene, you’ll have a big mess.