Many businesses wait days for someone to export data and build a report in Excel. Self-service BI lets managers answer their own questions from live data in minutes. Here is what to look for.

The usual reporting cycle goes like this: a manager asks a question, someone exports data, cleans it in Excel, builds a chart, and by the time it arrives the question has changed. Self-service reporting removes the middle steps.

Start from datasets, not tables

Business users should pick a dataset such as sales, inventory or finance, not raw database tables. Hayat Reports has 25 read-only datasets across finance, HR, sales, purchasing, inventory, CRM, helpdesk, the online store, Hayat Bazaar, sustainability, and the school, hotel, hospital, fuel station and charity workspaces.

Drag, drop and preview

Drag fields onto rows, columns and values and watch a live preview. Add filters, relative periods such as "last month", sorting and Top N. Calculated values, period comparisons with last month or last year, % of total and running totals cover most questions without a formula expert.

The right chart

Table, matrix, bar, column, stacked, line, area, combo, pie, donut, KPI card, gauge, scatter, heatmap, funnel, treemap and waterfall. Pakistani number formats in lac and crore make reports readable for local teams.

Dashboards with cross-filtering

Put charts, KPIs, tables and filters on one dashboard, click a bar to filter every other tile, and drill down from year to quarter, month and day. Starter templates for sales, inventory, finance, HR, school, hotel, hospital, fuel station, charity, online store, CRM and sustainability get you going quickly.

Reports that come to you

  • Scheduled emails daily, weekly or monthly as Excel, CSV, PDF or a link.
  • TV mode with auto refresh every 1 to 60 minutes for the office wall or shop floor.
  • Sharing with roles, named people, the whole company, or a read-only public link with an expiry date.

Safe by design

Self-service must not mean everyone sees everything. Reports should be read only, respect each dataset's module permissions, and limit results to the user's company and permitted branches. In Hayat, dashboard tiles a viewer cannot read show a lock instead of the figures.

Ask in plain words

With Hayat AI you can ask for a report in plain words and get a "what changed and why" summary, while the AI never writes SQL or formulas behind your back.

Explore Hayat Reports at reports.hayaterp.com.

Read more about Hayat Reports in Hayat ERP, or book a demo.

Frequently asked questions

What is self-service BI?

Self-service BI lets business users build their own reports and dashboards from prepared datasets with drag and drop, instead of waiting for IT or exporting data to Excel.

Can reports be emailed automatically?

Yes. In Hayat Reports, reports and dashboards can be emailed daily, weekly or monthly as Excel, CSV, PDF or a link.