Embedded reporting is a reporting engine that a software company builds into its own product, so that the product can produce invoices, statements and reports without the company writing that code itself. The engine is ready-made software from another company. The product's users never see the engine's name. They see only the reports, which carry the product's own name and logo.
Why would a software company not write this code itself? A report looks simple, but making one well is a lot of work. The layout must be exact, so that an invoice prints correctly on A4 paper. Long tables must break neatly across pages, with the column headings repeated on each page. Totals must appear at the foot of each page and at the end. The same report may be needed as a PDF, an Excel file or a web page. A reporting engine already does all of this.
Consider a software company in Coimbatore that sells billing and stock software to 3,000 wholesale traders of hardware and electrical goods. Its developers design each report once, in the engine's report designer. They draw the layout of the tax invoice: the trader's logo, the buyer's details, a table of items, the tax on each item and the total. Each box on the layout is linked to a column in the app's relational database.
Say a trader in Salem bills a building contractor for 40 switches and 200 metres of wire, worth ₹48,500 before tax. The app saves the sale. The engine reads the rows for that sale and fills in the layout. It adds the GST for each item and prints the totals. This trader's annual turnover is above the limit for e-invoicing. So the app has already reported the invoice to the government's invoice registration portal. The portal returned an invoice reference number (IRN) and a signed QR code, and the engine prints both on the invoice. The trader emails the PDF to the contractor. At the end of the month, the same engine produces the trader's sales register and a list of unpaid bills.
Each report must show one trader's data only. The software company keeps all 3,000 traders on the same system. So the engine adds the trader's own ID as a condition to every query. Without this condition, one trader could see another trader's sales.
Some reporting engines are open source. Anyone can download the basic engine free, and the company behind it sells a paid edition with more features and with support. This is the open source business model.
How is embedded reporting different from BI dashboards? A dashboard is a company's own tool for its own staff, and its charts are meant to be explored on a screen. Embedded reporting sits inside a product that is sold to other businesses. Most of what it produces is fixed documents that are printed, emailed or filed. Billing software, hospital software and small business accounting software all need such documents.