Top Down vs Bottom Up Reporting

Are YOU one of your company’s top down planners?

Do you struggle to maintain data integrity and accuracy across multiple channels or sources of data within your company?


Database To Dashboard is a system that is built for your company to bring all that data together, so you, as a company financial planning analyst, can more easily and efficiently make planning and budgeting decisions.

Top down vs Bottom up

Top down analysis begins at the macro level, looking at things like national economic data and then homing in on more micro variables. A bottom-up approach is the opposite, beginning micro (e.g. looking at a single company's financial statements) and then broadening out. In the end, there is no single best approach to investing, and every approach has its own pros and cons. A robust strategy is to employ features from both top-down and bottom-up together.


Bottom up vs top down can be quite simple—the top-down approach goes from the general to the specific, and the bottom-up approach begins at the specific and moves to the general, but without reliable data accuracy and in-time processing, on-time decision making can be something that takes weeks, not moments.


Database To Dashboard provides expert business planning and reporting solutions. Top-down vs Bottom-up processing, ad hoc reporting, to systems planning budgeting and analysis.



How do you build out your top down approach when your data is spread across multiple levels of systems?

The top-down approach relies on higher authority figures to determine larger goals that will filter down to the tasks of lower level employees. In comparison, the bottom-up style of communication features a decision-making process that gives the entire staff a voice in company goals.


An analyst seeking a top-down perspective wants to look at how systematic factors affect an outcome. In corporate finance, this can mean understanding how big-picture trends are affecting the entire industry. In budgeting, goal setting, and forecasting, the same concept can also apply to understand and manage the macro factors.


Companies utilizing the top-down approach in order to assess, determine, and implement business decisions made by senior executives are streamlined and communicated to operations and sales experts, who carry out these tasks. Consequently, projects are more easily managed, and risk is decreased significantly due to strategic decisions created from the top management to company-wide. This approach relies on the executive level to decide how to prioritize, manage, and conduct everyday processes.


A top-down approach is more generalized, and so may miss out on a number of potentially good opportunities by eliminating specific companies that don't fall into its criteria.

How do you perform Bottom up analysis?

The key to data analytics lies in asking the right questions, but success can often hinge on the person who is asking those questions.


Traditionally, organizations have analyzed their businesses from the perspective of the boardroom, approaching problems from the top down. But in trying to address how to best use their data to solve problems without first understanding the data itself, errors of human bias and oversimplification of the issue may occur. Consequently, company leaders may invest time, money, and resources into technology and products that don’t deliver on expectations. Just because a financial planning software package comes with a flashy colorful knack for highlighting correlated relationships doesn’t mean it’s all that great at proving the causal ones.


The solution lies in people, not in software.


Great decision making comes from smart people asking the right questions and being able to visualize their company’s shortfalls, issues and opportunities in the data they have in front of them.


That’s why our passion at Database To Dashboard is in the pooling together of your company data, providing your leaders and analysts with the power to scrutinize and generate very specific reporting pulling from not just one source of data, but every source of data within your company’s structure.


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    If you are the CEO considering this, it’s actually pretty simple: If you want to get the most out of your data analytics, find people who understand not only how to analyze the data, but also how to collaborate closely with marketers to uncover which data is most valuable and why. 


    Consider knowing what the five most important data relationships in the company are in order to achieve marketing impact. Then, make your decisions about key initiatives and investments to yield the returns from that knowledge. That’s what’s possible with a bottom-up approach.

    The tricky part is establishing the strength of these data relationships, which is easier for data scientists, who are accustomed to getting their hands dirty in the data and growing intimately familiar with it. These are the key players who are able to understand the metadata behind it all, the coding within it, what it takes to extract it, and what the circumstances were when it was collected. 


    A good data scientist can also discern the questions the data is posing, as well as where the data points are leading, in order to come to educated conclusions and make more accurate predictions.


    This puts data analysts in the perfect position to explicitly state what needs to be done. 


    Marketers can then shape those ideas into workable projects by sourcing information and taking the actions needed to reach the predicted outcomes. 


    The movement begins at the bottom. As the causal relationships and concepts your data scientists illuminate ascend through the organization, all stakeholders become inspired to jump on board. 


    In this way, even the loftiest of goals can be achieved.


    By identifying the lucrative resources that already dwell within your data, you can develop successful strategies within a short time frame. And working with talented data scientists enables you to make solid cost calculations, decide how to best integrate the data, and even make plans for collecting further data on an ongoing basis. 


    All of these are crucial factors in being able to form a realistic plan.


    Building a system with Database To Dashboard, of strategic analytics that can decipher what the data is actually telling you will help solve your marketing problems and enlighten the boardroom in the process.


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