The reporting stack — daily, weekly and monthly do different jobs
The problem
You send a daily sales figure, a weekly summary with the same figures aggregated, and a monthly pack that aggregates the weeks. Three preparations, one message. The MD reads the monthly, skims the weekly and has muted the daily.
What you need
Business: FMCG distributor, ₹18 crore, 190 retail accounts, Maharashtra. Readers: MD (decides credit, pricing, hiring), Sales head (decides allocation, visits), Warehouse head (decides dispatch priority).
The tool
A scheduled query plus a short AI summary
The prompt
What comes back
DAILY EXCEPTION REPORT — WhatsApp, under 80 words, 8am. Conditions: (1) any account in the top 40 by revenue with no order for 21 days — this is the one that would have caught your ₹31 lakh problem in week three; (2) daily order value below 60% of the trailing 14-day average; (3) any SKU below…
Verify before you use it
- Are the thresholds right for your business? 21 days for a top-40 account is a starting point — check it against your actual order frequency data before committing.
- Would the daily report have caught your real incident? Test it against the last three months of history. If it would not have fired, the threshold is wrong.
- Is anyone going to be upset that a report is being stopped? Ask before stopping — sometimes a report nobody acts on is still being used for something you do not know about.
- Check the delivery channel honestly. If the MD does not read email before 10am, an 8am email is not a daily report.