Which approach should I choose for testing my Spring Batch Job?

Currently I'm working on some integration tests for a Spring Batch application. Such application reads from a SQL table, writes on another table and, at the end, generates a report as a .txt file.

Initially I thought of just assuring that I had another file with the expected output and compare it with the report file and check the table content.

(For some context, I'm not very experienced on Spring).

But, after reading some articles on Baelung, I'm having doubts about my initial methodology. Should I manipulate the table content on my code to assure that I have the expected input? Should I use the Spring Test framework tools? Without them, I'm able to run the job from my test?