alt Hacker NewsThis is a naive view of what reporting entails and the difficulty of coalescing a report that meets the requirements of the audience the report is for. It isn't a numbers dump from a database, it requires substantial interpretation of things that the database does not and cannot contain. It isn't fiddling with the numbers, it is that the numbers can't contain things relevant to their representation for external parties as a legal matter.
When I have been in positions where reporting was a necessary part of my job, reporting related activity probably consumed 1/3 of my time. Even in highly optimized contexts, it consumes a stupid amount of time and the impact on the consumers of those reports is often quite low. It is almost a total waste of time.
There should be some reporting but the current cadence and requirements is way too high for many large companies. Reporting doesn't have infinite ROI.
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Why can't that interpretation be done earlier in the process and then put into the database?
Isn't it the same amount of transactions to be interpreted no matter what the reporting period is?
> it requires substantial interpretation of things that the database does not and cannot contain.
Do you have examples? This seems like something that is a solvable problem, and from the outside it can seem like it is only about not being willing to switch to a new paradigm. That unwilling ness can come from avoiding real consequences like loosing a competitive edge due to allocation of resources to the switchover.