Report Preparation – Characteristics of a Good Report

The market research is normally outsourced to third party agencies by organizations and in turn they create a professional report to the organization. These reports are preferably provided to senior officials who are the critical decision makers of the organization. Hence these reports need to be exclusively efficient and well formatted and the matter should be limpid, analytical and directive.

The actual facts must be depicted clearly and it is desirable that the data and results are furnished in graphical or tabular format which could create a substantially good impression and is unambiguous to understand. The reports must be essentially capable to compare related information in the report so that conclusions can be derived potentially and easily.

It is necessary for a report to contain following details to be called a good report:

1. Information collected in the report must be relevant and focused to derive desired results. Pictorial and graphical presentation of data and related information help to understand the details easily. There is a possibility that the collected data in the report needs to be represented at many places in different formats to fulfill the report goals. The ultimate goal is to determine all the issue and make suitable strategies to cope up with these issue or problems.

2. Report should follow the exact predefined goals and objectives. If there is any sort of divergence of related information which does not match the goals then the results are of no use. In fact there is a probability of landing up in making negative or out of focus strategies, which will be very dangerous.

3. The report should always contain the executive summary of the work. This is generally kept before the actual report starts as it shows the summary of the desired business plan.

4. Apart from the actual analysis the report should also depict the reasons of making this report and what advantages and profit it can provide after successful implementation of business plans described inside the report.

5. It should also contain the methodology of the research which shows the overall process adopted to create the report.

6. It is important that the report contains the possibility of errors in any of the module or process so that immediate measures could be taken to cope up with these errors.

7. The report should contain the description of the questionnaires used in analysis and the way it has been prepared.

8. The methodology used in the interviews should also be elaborated and what was achieved in this should also be described.

9. If the information show that some aspects needs to predict the future trends then the reports should depict that prediction. This prediction should have scale of success so that the accuracy could be judged efficaciously. The report should also define each and every variable and element used in creating these predictive analyses.

10. The report should be flexible enough to be changed accordingly. The analytical information described inside the report should be maintained in such a way that there is no extra effort labored if any strategy or process it to be changed in future. It should necessarily mould the changes without changing the structure of the report.

The analytical report creation is very important phase of market research which acts as a blueprint of the business plan which is to be executed. By following the above guidelines while report generation process can be efficiently taken care of.