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.

Ready to talk to data
analysis experts?
Let's dive into your data complexities and look at building a plan to funnel your company's data into a Database To Dashboard console.