If you run a small business in Perth, you probably know this feeling. It's the end of the month. You need to know how the business is going. So you open Excel, then MYOB, then your CRM, then maybe a POS system, then a couple of emails with numbers in them — and somehow you're supposed to turn all of that into a clear picture of what's happening.
It never works. And you're not alone.
The multi-platform reporting problem
Most small businesses in Perth don't have one system. They have five, six, sometimes ten. Accounting in Xero or MYOB. Sales in a CRM or just a spreadsheet. Timesheets somewhere. Inventory somewhere else. Marketing in another tool entirely.
Each of those platforms has its own reports, its own export format, and its own way of defining things. Your CRM says you had 40 new leads last month. Your accounting software says you invoiced 12 new clients. Your marketing tool says your campaign generated 200 enquiries. None of those numbers talk to each other.
So what actually happened? Nobody knows — not without spending half a day pulling data into a spreadsheet and trying to make sense of it.
Why spreadsheet reporting eventually breaks
Spreadsheets are great when you're starting out. One person, one file, a few formulas. Simple.
But spreadsheets don't scale. Here's what typically goes wrong for Perth small businesses as they grow:
- Copy-paste errors — someone accidentally pastes over a formula and your totals are suddenly wrong for three months before anyone notices
- Version control nightmares — "Sales Report FINAL v3 (2).xlsx" — which one is actually right?
- Manual data entry — if a human has to type numbers from one system into another, mistakes are guaranteed
- No real-time visibility — your report is only as current as the last time someone updated it, which was probably last Thursday
- Single point of failure — when the person who built the spreadsheet leaves, nobody knows how it works
What good reporting actually looks like
Good reporting for a small business isn't about fancy dashboards or enterprise software. It's about being able to answer basic questions without spending hours pulling data together:
- How much revenue did we do this month compared to last month?
- Which services or products are actually making us money?
- Are we on track for our quarterly targets?
- Where are our leads coming from, and which ones are converting?
- How much are we spending versus what we planned?
If you can't answer those questions in under five minutes, your reporting needs work.
The Perth small business data challenge
Perth has its own quirks when it comes to business reporting. Many local businesses work across industries like construction, mining services, hospitality, and professional services — sectors where data is often fragmented across project management tools, site systems, and good old-fashioned paper forms.
Add in the fact that a lot of Perth businesses are family-owned or owner-operated, and the person responsible for reporting is usually the same person responsible for everything else. There's no dedicated analyst. There's no IT department. There's just someone who needs to know whether the business is healthy.
That's actually the perfect scenario for getting data analytics sorted properly — because you don't need a massive enterprise platform. You need a handful of connected reports that pull from the tools you're already using.
How to fix it without starting from scratch
You don't need to rip out your existing systems. The tools you already use — Xero, MYOB, HubSpot, Shopify, Google Sheets, whatever — they all have data that can be connected.
Here's the general approach that works for most Perth small businesses:
1. Pick your biggest pain point first. Don't try to report on everything at once. What's the one question you need answered most? Start there.
2. Connect, don't replace. Tools like Power BI can pull data directly from your existing platforms without you having to change how you work day-to-day.
3. Automate the boring bits. If you're manually exporting CSVs and pasting them into spreadsheets every week, that process can almost certainly be automated.
4. Make it visual. Numbers in a spreadsheet are hard to read. A chart that shows revenue trending up or down over the past twelve months tells you immediately what's going on.
5. Keep it simple. Three dashboards that people actually use are worth more than twenty that nobody looks at.
When to get help
If you've been meaning to sort out your reporting for the past six months but haven't got around to it, that's a sign. The longer you leave it, the messier the data gets and the harder it is to untangle.
A good starting point is a data discovery session — sit down with someone who understands both the tools and the business, map out what data you've got and where it lives, and figure out what reporting would actually make a difference to how you run your business.
We do exactly this for Perth businesses — no obligation, no jargon, just a practical conversation about what's possible with the data you already have.