Is anybody using TeX for business reporting?

TeX/Latex and all their friends are the best solution for any type of reports (sorry if I am biased).

I use them for probably the most unlike application. Construction reports - as in Building Construction! I have been doing so for quite a long time. The reports include anything from graphs to financial summaries and commissioning data for electro-mechanical services.

Some pointers, before you automate anything write a few static reports. Define what changes weekly/monthly such as graphs, tables etc. and then automate via python/lua or whatever language you are comfortable.

At the moment - I just import tables via PgfplotsTable. This makes it easy to interface with external programs via csv delimited tables. The datatool package also provides similar functionality. All graphs are automated via LaTeX. No need to struggle to interface with external programs.

Use LaTeX to start with and PGF/TikZ for graphics. Get some pointers from Tufte for presentation and readability. It is not necessary to buy anything.

One of the drawbacks I had at the beginning was to convince people to give sections of the content in plain text files and to get them to divorce excel.

I have already implemented a report generation tool in a business setting in LaTeX/Python/gnuplot, and it works great! The only problem for me was to get the idea accepted in the company. I ended up writing a proof of concept utility that generates professional looking reports. There are no problems what so ever. The reports generated is about 100 pages long and used to take the company days to write. Now the entire thing is generated in ten seconds. :)

So how do you convince you coworkers of the LaTeX way? Most people had never heard of LaTeX and even though most people were interested in the idea, they wanted it "implemented" in MS Word. Even now they are skeptical of the idea since I am the only TeXer in the company and nobody else can alter the software if I leave. My software is used by other people in the company, and saves us huge amounts of money, but I still doubt that I will get to use more engineering time on TeX ...

Good luck, though!

You might want to check out R and Sweave. R is great for analysing data and generating tables and graphs. Sweave is a tool for integrating this output into LaTeX.

I wrote a post on getting started with Sweave.