some reflections on "reports"...

Many of our customers are asking us to summarize the information in weekly or monthly reports, send them through email to the relevant members of the organization, and store them. Managers want to promote it as one of our most important featues and place many work hours into it. I get the utility of periodic reports in a pre-computer world... but we have the ability to show the whole history, and then seprate them into weekly or monthly averages. You can see the data in real time without having to wait until the next report. We could just give them a link and say "hey, if you ever want to see how your company is doing / history of your progress, here's the data." I feel like the only utility of reports is for people who don't have the initiative to look at the state of the company more than once a month (like investors)