EPM Reporting: Templates, Examples, How to Get Started, & Best Practices

June 26, 2025

Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) provides users across your company with digestible, up-to-the-minute details about the key metrics driving your organization’s success. This might mean a sales performance dashboard for your Chief Revenue Officer, a snapshot of “days sales outstanding” (DSO) for the A/R collections team, or an item sales trend analysis for product management. It could also include a marketing dashboard that summarizes response rates for recent campaigns, or even a traditional financial report such as a year-to-date profit and loss (P&L) with year-over-year variances. For virtually everyone in your organization, EPM reporting can be a powerful tool for defining measurable targets, monitoring performance, and bringing your data to life.

Simplified EPM Reporting

Although the potential of EPM is massive, many of the current EPM tools available have a reputation for being complex, difficult to use, and costly to maintain. For example, Oracle Hyperion and Oracle PBCS have robust capabilities, but these come at a high cost. That cost isn’t limited to staff resources and hefty license fees, though. Creating reports from the ground up can be a lengthy, labor-intensive process that’s usually outsourced to the IT department. In many organizations, this means logging an IT ticket, communicating your needs, and waiting until someone has time to respond to your request.

Although many of these EPM tools require extensive training and a high level of technical expertise, this isn’t true in every case. JustPerform, for instance, is remarkably user-friendly, allowing users in the finance department to develop powerful, flexible reports without help from the IT department. This enables teams like yours to get off the ground more quickly and simplifies your EPM reporting process to be more manageable and helpful.

Top 5 EPM Reporting Templates & Examples

Combining that ease-of-use with a collection of pre-built EPM templates gets you up and running even faster. This translates to tangible business results in a shorter period and greater business agility because you can modify reports quickly and easily, adapting to changing conditions.

Our platforms offer a variety of EPM templates, including front-page storyboards with key metrics intuitively displayed and image redirects that lead to more detailed reports. You’ll also find things like an FTE trend analysis, a regional sales performance dashboard, and a variety of P&L formats. insightsoftware finance experts have tailored each template to a specific metric, workflow, or strategic priority. Without requiring any input from IT, these templates fulfill the majority of reporting requirements for most organizations. This results in immediate business value for teams using JustPerform for the first time. To get a better sense of what templates can do, consider some of these top examples:

Sales Performance by Location

Although simple on the surface, this Sales Performance by Location template offers a complete picture of performance. It breaks down sales by location (region, country, city, etc.) and product. Users can drill into the data behind any metric for in-depth understanding, or glance at the indicators included along with each metric to quickly see how they’re trending. Changing locations and products is easy, making this report ideal for any company that wants to learn more about sales performance across locations, whether domestic or multi-national.

Management Information Dashboard

In the best instances, effective reports condense lots of information into an accessible and digestible format. This Management Information Dashboard template does exactly that, integrating the most important KPIs and creating a single source of truth for understanding enterprise performance. A smart design combined with straightforward visualizations allows this template to communicate volumes about your organizational performance and identify areas for improvement.

KPIs Overview

This KPIs Overview template offers another high-level overview of enterprise performance, but from a different perspective. Users pick the three KPIs they need to track most closely, such as sales, gross margin, and EBITDA. The EPM report template then displays those metrics in increasing levels of granularity, concluding with dynamic waterfall charts that incorporate drillable tables. With this report, it only takes a second for leadership to know whether KPIs are trending up or down, while analysts and other users have easy access to more granular data relevant to what’s driving those trends.

Multiple Bar and Line Charts

It can be difficult to quickly identify patterns within complicated graphs with lots of data and broadly distributed values. Sometimes, a simple trend line can offer the best insight. Multiple bar and line charts are an effective way to show trends in software like JustPerform because they allow a user to combine multiple metrics (revenue, quantity, traffic, etc.) and dimensions (date, country, product category, etc.). By mixing line charts and bar charts, you can display up to 6 axis-frames in one report.

Profit and Loss With Trend Analysis

Focusing even more closely, this Profit and Loss with Trend Analysis template allows users to select any account on the P&L statement and get a complete trend analysis comparing actuals, budget, and last year’s data. Users can track the pulse of enterprise performance and instantly access data and analyses that would otherwise take extensive amounts of research time to collect.

How to Get Started & Use EPM Reporting Templates

As advantageous as interactive EPM reporting may be, it’s not always easy to build best-in-class reports. Thankfully, JustPerform’s pre-built templates make it remarkably easy to do exactly this. Now that you’ve seen some examples and understand the benefits of an EPM reporting environment built around templates, let’s talk about how you can start taking advantage of this powerful strategy in your organization:

Step 1: Choose Your Data Sources

EPM tools like JustPerform automatically pull information from group financial data to create consolidated budgeting and planning reports. Our platforms are built to access this information, as well as external information through connectors, so you have a complete overview of the most important information for decision makers. To get the most out of this, consider all data sources that might be valuable to calculate KPIs (or provide additional context around those KPIs), and create a list of data connectors that you’ll need.

Step 2: Choose Reporting Templates

The quickest way to get started with interactive reporting is to work with pre-built templates created by domain experts. Typically, these templates incorporate best practices for design as well as metric selection and performance monitoring, designed to handle the most common reporting needs of your industry. Find the models that look and function the way you want to identify a starting point, and tailor it from there. For those with more unique reporting requirements, consider building customized reports from the ground up.

Step 3: Select the Dimensions

Multi-dimensional reporting provides a highly interactive experience for users. Start by choosing the various dimensions (qualitative attributes) that will be available to users, such as time period, country, entity, or product line. This allows users to quickly adjust the information they’re viewing to analyze different data slices. The key is to choose the most important dimensions for decision makers, particularly those that enable comparisons between adjacent periods, business units, product lines, or sales channels.

Step 4: Create Multiple Points of View

Much like dimensions, users should be able to view the same information in multiple different contexts. For example, the section of the report that tracks net sales can indicate how those sales compare to the current budget or the previous year. Being able to quickly give information new context is one of the most powerful features of an interactive EPM report.

Step 5: Highlight Information in Tiles

Tiles are bold blocks of information that combine all the necessary details to understand a single KPI like Gross Margin Percentage, Net Profit, or Working Capital. The point of tiles is to put essential information front and center, so that decision makers always have a perspective into organizational performance and what’s affecting it.

Step 6: Drill Into the Data

Unlike static reports, which only report a snapshot in time before they become out of date, dynamic EPM reports present a wide range of information in one place, constantly updated as new data becomes available. On the surface, they condense a lot of information into a digestible format. Underneath that surface, however, is a vast amount of data that went into calculating specific metrics. With dynamic reporting, users in your company have an entry point from which they can explore virtually any aspect of performance. Ideally, your EPM reporting tools should make that exploration process as simple and intuitive as possible.

Step 7: Translate Information Visually

Let’s face it — it can be difficult to identify patterns, outliers, and other significant information when numbers are simply presented in rows and columns on a screen. Visualizations bring data to life, providing tremendous value to the users in your organization. Elements like charts, graphs, trend lines, and indicators (e.g. up or down arrows) bring the information to life. They help users make sense of the information quickly, easily, and intuitively.

Step 8: Create a Storyboard

By itself, a single report rarely tells the whole story. After following the steps above to create individual reports, group reports relevant to one another in what’s known as a storyboard. Storyboards create a narrative that explains performance. They place individual reports within a broader context, enhancing the meaning and value to the users who rely on these reports. For each storyboard, be sure to include the highly relevant reports while excluding any others that aren’t important. In addition, it’s helpful to organize the reports so that each one builds upon the previous, painting a clear and intuitive picture for decision makers.

Step 9: Always Be Adapting

Businesses change, and their needs evolve — consider how the COVID-19 pandemic affected revenue, supply chains, and production capacity. Those who had quick access to information were at a distinct advantage over those who did not. Companies that could track business performance visually and intuitively, in real time, were better equipped than others who were left to rely upon static reports filled with rows and columns of numbers.

Relying on the same types of reports over and over can lead to tunnel vision and stale decision-making. A better approach is to proactively create new reports that analyze the complicated performance issues from multiple perspectives. As long as you rely on tools that make it just as easy to create reports (like JustPerform) as it is to run reports, your company is fully equipped to understand its strengths and weaknesses whenever change happens.

EPM Reporting Best Practices for 2025

Performance either fuels or inhibits growth, and your EPM reporting is a critical component of this. Improving performance begins by understanding where strengths and weaknesses exist. By condensing massive amounts of data into clear and actionable insights, companies can make informed strategic decisions that further their performance goals, such as boosting growth. However, this can only be done with clear EPM reports, so follow these best practices to get the most out of your performance management:

• Vet Your Vendors: The quality of EPM reporting largely relies on the technology facilitating it. There are dozens of reporting solutions on the market, and not all of them are created equal. Instead of prioritizing bells and whistles, look for a product that supports your reporting goals and vendors that offer stellar support. It’s important to consider things like customization options, implementation timelines, and scalability limits as well.
• Get Everyone on Board: The finance department typically takes the lead on EPM reporting, but they’re not the only department that can benefit from it. In reality, every department has a stake in performance management, so more stakeholders should have access to the reports — or at least be aware of why they’re being used and key takeaways. You don’t need to give every employee access, but EPM reporting is a lot more impactful when it’s not isolated to a handful of people.
• Unburden IT: In the past, users had to rely heavily on IT to find data, generate insights, and design EPM reports, which took a lot of time and limited the number of reports that could be run. Now, many of those processes can be automated so non-technical users can generate reports independently. Look for tools that are intuitive and user-friendly enough for anyone to create clear reports.
• Empower the Users: Even the simplest EPM reporting tools will take some training to master. Make this training a part of the implementation process, and invest in getting users to get up to speed. Then, repeat this training on an ongoing basis and whenever you make a new hire, to ensure that everyone on the team is using EPM reporting tools to the fullest.

Next Steps to Get Started with EPM

Many EPM solutions simply capture and aggregate data rather than present information in a compelling way that truly supports effective business decisions. The built-in reporting that comes with most ERP software is generally too limited and inflexible to respond to the fast-changing world in which businesses must operate today. However, data-driven insights from EPM reporting are not only important now, but will be even more critical in the coming years as technology moves even faster. The companies that excel at EPM reporting will be able to confidently navigate the opportunities and obstacles of tomorrow’s economy.

If you’re looking for EPM reporting that’s built with this in mind, insightsoftware can help. We offer a range of reporting, planning, and analysis tools for businesses of all sizes. Our purpose-built, all-in-one EPM reporting solution, JustPerform, helps transform your business data into dynamic insights for the C-suite and others in your organization. If you’d like to see the power of our interactive EPM reporting firsthand, contact us today to arrange a demo of JustPerform.