The sources of information that you use in your business can be primary information or information that you obtain yourself inside your own company. This is also known as internal information. There are different types of internal information (as opposed to external sources of information) such as financial, personnel, marketing, purchasing, sales, manufacturing and administration. Internal information sources can be defined as follows:

Financial Information: financial information is information related to the performance and profit and loss of the company. This will include information on how much you pay for items, how much you pay staff, the costs of rates and the taxes that you pay as a business. To monitor the financial information you need to have a Financial Controller or Accountants to ensure that the business continues to operate and generate a profit.

Personnel Information: Personnel information is information held by the company on their employees. This information must be freely available to the employee any time that they request it. Personnel information can be used to monitor how long an employee has worked for a company and if they are entitled to a salary increase due to this based on the company policy. Other information may be held such as the productivity rate of an employee and a bonus might be given based on performance and targets. It is import that the company has up to date information on all employees for health and safety reasons. Companies also need to get proof of qualifications from employees to ensure they are suitably qualified for a certain position on entry to the company. The employee can progress within the company after their information is updated with any internal or external training programs that relate to their job.

Marketing Information: Marketing information is used by the market team to identify what products or services offered by the business are most successful. The marketing team can collect information from different departments such as sales to promote certain products or services based on current success rates. Marketing information can be obtained using external sources or by using surveys to see what customers like or dislike about your product or service. This information can be used to streamline or improve your business and keep customers happy.

Purchasing Information: Purchasing information is collected by the purchasing department who are involved with buying all of the products needed to run your business. These products could be stationary or computers need for the day to day running of your business or multi-million dollar parts used in your manufacturing process. The purchasing department needs to monitor the cost and quality of all purchased goods to ensure they get the best deal and maximise profits for the company.

Sales Information: Just like the purchasing information sales information needs to be monitored based on the product or services offered by your company. This information needs to be passed to the financial controllers of your companies to ensure that the cost of your good or service is less than the sale price. If the sale of a certain product is down then this information would need to be passed to the marketing team to see if it is worth launching a new marketing campaign to increase sales of the product.

Manufacturing information: This is information about the cost of manufacturing goods within the company. The manufacturing cost will normally include the running cost of all machinery, the wages paid to production staff and the cost of raw materials (including waste) used up in the manufacturing process. An example of monitoring manufacturing costs would be for a company that mass produces furniture such as IKEA they would need to ensure that they create cut patterns to ensure that they got as many parts as possible from a single 8 foot by 4 foot piece of ply would. If they decreased the amount of waste cut by 10% this could save the company millions over a few years.

Administration Information: Administration information links very much with personnel information but also involves communicating with external sources and storing information on customers to build successful relationships with them.