how to write a monthly summary report

How to Write a Monthly Business Report? 5 Report Examples and Templates

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Monthly business reports are one of the best ways to keep your internal stakeholders in the loop and make sure they are up to date with the latest company activities.

These reports include recent accomplishments, productivity levels, current tasks, and overall significant happenings that have occurred within the past month. They are used as a foundation for future decision-making and healthy business growth. No wonder that more than 75% of companies report on Marketing at least once a month, according to Databox’s state of business reporting .

In most cases, you will present a monthly business report to the most important company members, which is why you should formulate them meticulously and carefully.

Of course, you will have your hands full with other tasks, and creating a detailed report each month can become tiresome if you don’t use the right methods.

This guide will teach you what monthly business reports are, why you should use them, and provide you with practices and a step-by-step guide you can follow to create them quicker and with more efficiency.

Want to impress your stakeholders with a great monthly business report? Let’s dive in.

What Is a Monthly Business Report?

Why are monthly management reports important for businesses, what should be included in a monthly business report, how to write a monthly business report, monthly reporting best practices, monthly report templates.

• I mprove and Automate Monthly Business Reporting with Databox

Monthly business reports are documents that summarize all of the most important activities, operational information, and data collected during a particular month.

They include the most significant statements from each business department and should be presented in an understandable way to the stakeholders.

Executives use these types of business reports to showcase certain performances, results, schedules, and eventual problems. Monthly reports have become a common practice within companies since they are one of the most effective ways to keep the highest-ranking company members informed on the latest activities.

When each important member is up to date with everything that’s going on in the company, you can work together to create future plans, decisions, goals, and solutions to specific problems.

You should try to keep monthly business reports brief but extensive.

Related : Quarterly Business Review: How to Write One and How to Present It Successfully

Operating a company is a team effort. The highest-ranking members typically have plenty of different tasks to complete and overlook specific parts of the business.

However, completing any type of task requires insight into how things are operating at the other ends of the company. Monthly reports provide this insight.

Here are some of the most important things monthly business reports can help with:

• Evaluating the financial performance of the business as a whole and making decisions based on the operational data.
• Having a clear picture of budget spending. You can compare the estimated budget with what’s actually being spent.
• Measuring the overall actual performance and checking if it is in line with the goals you set for the future.
• Formulating new strategies and making decisions with the aim to enable healthy business growth.
• Recognizing and coming up with both short and long-term plans on how to handle the company’s resources.
• Minimizing any risks that can cause harm to the company by reviewing the budget on a monthly basis and preparing for future market fluctuations.
• Staying on top of contenders by tracking the company’s progress and maintaining a competitive position.
• Analyzing historical trends to come up with accurate performance forecasts.

Monthly business reports have to be well-formatted, organized, concise, and understandable. All of the most important data within a month will be included so there mustn’t be any space for misinterpretation.

Creating a monthly report isn’t the easiest task, but there are some universal guidelines that you can follow to make sure your report passes with flying colors.

These are the most important things your monthly business report should incorporate.

Branded Cover Page

Mission, vision, and values, table of contents, organizational scorecard views, detailed pages, high-level project overviews, an online version of the report.

The first page of your report is also the first impression. No matter how good your report may be overall, your cover page shouldn’t come off as sloppy.

The cover page highlights the logo, name, address, and other key pieces of information. By creating a branded cover page, you will show the stakeholders that you are a true professional who takes these reports seriously. 

Defining your organization, in the long run, is necessary for appropriate planning. It will also help you come up with an adequate strategy to achieve the goals you have set for the future.

To make sure the strategy succeeds, your employees need to know the mission you have in mind.

Include mission, vision, and value statements at the beginning of your monthly report to better present your overall strategy.

Even though your monthly report should be as brief as possible, in bigger companies it could end up having dozens of pages.

Also, the stakeholders may be interested in reading one part of the report more than another, and including a table of contents will make navigation easier.

Scorecards have always been one of the best ways for companies to identify and improve their internal operations. They include historic performance data and provide feedback that can be useful for making future decisions.

Including scorecards in your report will increase the readability of the various financial statements and performance overviews.

Generally, the best way to organize scorecards is through different perspectives:

• Financial perspective
• Customer perspective
• Internal perspective
• Learning and growth perspective

Explain the value of each of these so your team can easily grasp the bigger picture.

To make sure everyone is clear on the objectives, you should include detailed pages that contain the most significant information.

Monthly management meetings tend to involve discussions about objectives and future plans. While having a brief analysis of the projects and metrics can help clarify certain things, there are some topics that you want to discuss more thoroughly.

Detailed pages can help you engage in these thorough discussions.

Comprehensive charts equal happy leadership teams.

Creating a monthly business report can’t go without including the most important KPIs. The best way to present KPIs is through charts. Make sure they are easy to read, consistent, and well-visualized.

While discussions are an important part of monthly management meetings , you don’t want to be discussing every little detail of the ongoing projects.

Include an overall brief for each project with the most important information and leave the prolonged discussions for project review meetings.

Last-minute changes to monthly reports happen all the time. Having an online version of the report helps you keep the information up to date more efficiently and it makes it easily accessible to stakeholders that might not be able to join the meeting.

Also, if you need to make any small adjustments to the reports during the meetings, you can implement them right away in the online version of the report.

Now that you know what your monthly report should include, we can move on to the writing process.

Since you will be writing these reports each month it’s important to have certain guidelines that you can follow every time.

Follow these five steps to create a great monthly business report in no time:

• Gather Data and Information from the Past Month
• Study and Analyze the Gathered Data and Information
• Make Use of Graphs and Charts
• Come Up with Solutions to Problems
• Review Everything from Start to Finish

1. Gather Data and Information from the Past Month

The most important data and information of the month are the key contents of any good monthly report. You can’t start writing without gathering them first.

Ask the employees from different departments to provide you with the paperwork so you can obtain the data you need to include. Also, make sure to include your own observations about the situation in the company.

2. Study and Analyze the Gathered Data and Information

After you have gathered all the information you need from the various departments, you should start analyzing them.

Find out what led to certain outcomes and what caused problems. Create official statements that explain the causes and consequences of specific actions.

3. Make Use of Graphs and Charts

Visualizing the most important metrics and KPIs through graphs and charts can make the report much more comprehensible.

They can also make it easier for the readers to connect the different variables and understand better what you are presenting.

4. Come Up with Solutions to Problems

Every business in the world occasionally runs into some kind of problem. What separates great companies is their ability to deal with them as soon as they arise.

If there was some kind of problem during the month, make sure you come up with a couple of solutions. This way, your superiors will know that there isn’t any reason to panic and that you have everything under control.

5. Review Everything from Start to Finish

Before you provide the stakeholders with the finished monthly report, go over it once more. It’s always a good idea to proofread it and check if all the information you provided accurately represents the overall performance and future strategies. You will also see if there is anything that you forgot to add or overlooked.

PRO TIP: How Well Are Your Marketing KPIs Performing?

Like most marketers and marketing managers, you want to know how your efforts are translating into results each month. How is your website performing? How well are you converting traffic into leads and customers? Which marketing channels are performing best? How does organic search compare to paid campaigns and to previous months? You might have to scramble to put all of this together in a single report, but now you can have it all at your fingertips in a single Databox dashboard.

Our Monthly Marketing Performance Dashboard includes data from Google Analytics 4 and HubSpot Marketing with key performance metrics like:

• Website sessions, new users, and new leads. Basic engagement data from your website. How much traffic? How many new visitors? How many lead conversions?
• Lead generation vs goal. Did you reach your goal for lead conversion for the month, quarter, or year? If not, by how much did you miss?  
• Overall marketing performance . A summary list of the main KPIs for your website: sessions, contacts, leads, customers, bounce rate, avg. session duration, pages/session, and pageviews.
• Email response . Overall, how effective were your email campaigns, measured by email opens?
• Blog post traffic . How much traffic did your blog attract during a certain period?
• New contacts by source. Which sources drove the highest number of new contacts 
• Visits and contacts by source. How did your sources compare by both sessions and new contacts in a certain period of time?

Now you can benefit from the experience of our Google Analytics and HubSpot Marketing experts, who have put together a plug-and-play Databox template that contains all the essential metrics for monitoring and analyzing your website traffic and its sources, lead generation, and more. It’s simple to implement and start using as a standalone dashboard or in marketing reports, and best of all, it’s free!

You can easily set it up in just a few clicks – no coding required.

To set up the dashboard, follow these 3 simple steps:

Step 1: Get the template 

Step 2: Connect your HubSpot and Google Analytics 4 accounts with Databox. 

Step 3: Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.

Implementing certain practices into monthly reporting can transform your company’s performance. They can make reporting faster and easier for each party involved.

However, if the report contains errors, misleading information, or is presented inefficiently, it can cause quite a bit of trouble.

The leading companies in the world use several practices to make sure their monthly business reports are always state of the art. We picked out five:

• Filter Useful and Accurate Data Each Week
• Make up-to-date data available to key decision makers and stakeholders at all times and in all places
• Remove complexity from financial reports
• Implement a strong, well-organized reporting process
• Set Strategic Goals and Objectives

1. Filter Useful and Accurate Data Each Week

No matter how big or small your business is, you will probably be receiving a large amount of data each week. The best way to prevent it from piling up is by freeing up time at the end of the week to categorize it.

Time goes fast, but it goes even faster in growing businesses. You may think that categorizing data on a weekly basis will end up taking up more of your time, but that isn’t the case.

By filtering the most useful and accurate data each week, you will already have a better idea of what to include in the monthly report when you start writing it. You can use different reports to place the data you have filtered over the previous weeks and combine it all in one place in your monthly report.

Related : How to Analyze Data: 30+ Experts on Making Sense of Your Performance

2. Make up-to-date data available to key decision makers and stakeholders at all times and in all places

To establish healthy business growth, the key decision-makers have to provide their input and be caught up on the latest activities.

As we said, in growing businesses, data can pile up rather quickly and you will have to make certain decisions along the way.

For better decision-making, it’s wise to make the latest data available to all the stakeholders and department leaders in one place. Online reports are a great choice since they can be updated as soon as something changes.

With online reports, all the key decision-makers in the company will be able to have an insight into the most recent and important information regarding the company’s performance, and they can access them from anywhere. You won’t have to arrange in-person meetings for every single detail.

Related : How to Set Up an Automated Reporting System: Tips, Tools and Best Practices

3. Remove complexity from financial reports

When creating your monthly business report, you should keep in mind that not every member is trained to understand accounting terminology. This doesn’t mean their ideas are any less useful.

By simplifying the complex financial information and making it understandable to all the potential problem solvers, you will have a much easier time creating future strategies.

One good way to increase the readability of financial statements is through graphs and charts built in centralized financial reporting software . Visualizing the most important metrics and financial KPIs can be a lot more powerful than conveying the message through words alone.

Related : How to Write a Great Business Expense Report: A Step-By-Step Guide with Examples

4. Implement a strong, well-organized reporting process

Writing a good monthly report involves a lot of steps that you have to follow precisely and in order.

Aside from having digital or paper checklists, you also have to clarify who needs to do what and give departments deadlines on when to provide information that you will have to include in the report.

Without specifying these things, you risk falling behind on the reporting process and having the report turn out inaccurate.

Creating a checklist and telling department leaders when to provide data will have a major impact on the organizational aspect of your monthly reports.

Once you have a precise reporting process in play that you can use each month, the reporting process will be much more efficient and will take up less of your time.

Related : How to Write a Great Business Development Report: A Step By Step Guide with Examples

5. Set Strategic Goals and Objectives

Before you begin writing your monthly report, you should have a clear idea of what goals and objectives you want to set at the end.

Why is that certain piece of information important? Are the customers satisfied? Is there anything from the previous month that needs to be changed?

By having the answers to the most important questions you will understand which company affairs will have to be thoroughly addressed in the report.

Make sure you set the next month’s objectives and goals clearly and let the stakeholders know what they can do to help.

Related : What Is Strategic Reporting? 4 Report Examples to Get Inspiration From

Monthly business reports are used to keep stakeholders up to date with the latest information regarding the company’s performance.

They include the most important data from each department and track KPIs with the goal of making them understandable to all the high-ranking members.

To stay on top of modern technology and remain competitive, many businesses turn to monthly report templates to present the company’s performance accurately.

Here are some templates that you can use to improve your monthly business reporting process:

Project Management Report

Monthly sales report, monthly marketing report, social media monthly report, monthly financial business report.

Use this Project Management Report from Harvest to track all of your most important projects in one place. This dashboard will help you monitor all your tracked time, billable hours and billable amount split by projects in Harvest. Use this report to see how many hours are tracked on a monthly, quarterly and yearly basis, split tracked time by projects and compare with previous periods, and more.

The Monthly Sales Report from HubSpot CRM can help sales representatives manage and track their monthly sales activities much more efficiently.

This report tracks monthly progress in all of the most important areas such as:

• Deal pipelines and level of progress in sales
• Comparison of monthly activities
• Creating/closing deals rate

The key metrics included are sales funnels, deal funnels, open deals by owner, closing deals by owner, and closed won amount.

Pro Tip : If you want to drill down into your data further and create valuable context around it that you can easily share, you can use our Free HubSpot CRM Monthly Performance Report Template . Manual reporting is a time-consuming and tedious process. Databox Reports offer automation features to make the reporting process quicker and easier, so you can make reporting a regular part of your workflow.

One of the best ways to capture all the efforts of marketing is through the Monthly Marketing Report. This dashboard provides answers to questions like:

• Which traffic sources generate the most leads?
• How to track the number of new users?
• How to compare traffic from email vs. blogs?
• Are the marketing efforts paying off?

It also includes key metrics such as bounce rate, new users, pages/sessions, and page views.

PRO TIP: You can use text slides to give your agency the flexibility to provide context right where it belongs—inside your client report. Write up your report inside Databox, no slide deck is needed. Auto-add Insights to help build a narrative that proves ROI and guides all stakeholders to the next right step. All that with our Free Advanced HubSpot Marketing Performance Report Template . This report template includes the following sections – HubSpot Marketing overview, Website Performance overview, Landing Page Performance overview, Blog Performance overview, Email Performance overview, Work Completed, and Recommendations.

Do you want to measure the impact social media marketing has on your website? You can do it by using our Social Media Monthly Report .

This dashboard lets you track all the crucial metrics and create accurate reports based on your social media data.

Furthermore, you will gain insights into all the crucial activities going on across your social media networks. You will get the answers to these questions:

• How many likes do I have on my Facebook page?
• How to track follower growth on different channels?
• Which social media drives the most traffic to my website?

Pro Tip : You can use this free Organic Social Monthly Performance Report Template to share insights and create context and a story around your Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn Performance. With Data Story slides, you get pre-written insights that you can use to share your results in a more meaningful way, and, even better—your text will stay up to date along with your data.

The Monthly Financial Business Report can help you monitor the overall financial health of your company. Also, you can use it to quickly identify problems that could impact your company’s cash flow and turnover.

This dashboard is also extremely useful if you use QuickBooks and HubSpot since you can connect your accounts to the report in just a few minutes.

The key metrics that are included in this report are paid invoice amount, gross profit margin, expenses, and income.   

Improve and Automate Monthly Business Reporting with Databox

Monthly business reports are the foundation of better decision-making and company scaling. They should always be accurate and understandable since they keep the stakeholders updated on the most significant activities that occurred within a month.

Databox can help you take your monthly business reports to the next level.

By visualizing all of the most important metrics and KPIs through customizable dashboards, you can easily break down even the most complex financial statements to your stakeholders. Furthermore, you can use Databox to track all of the most important data from each department in one place to make the reporting process much less time-consuming.

Sign up for a free trial and automate your monthly business reporting in no time.

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3 Smart Monthly Report Templates: How to Write and Free Downloads

By archtc on October 12, 2019 — 7 minutes to read

• How to Build a Monthly Report: Best Practices Part 1
• Monthly Report Downloads: Sample Templates Part 2
• Additional Resources Part 3
• How to dramatically reduce the time you spend creating reports Part 4

How to wrIte a Monthly Progress Report (+ Free Templates)

Keeping stakeholders engaged is easily done through monthly reports. A monthly report template is handy when you need to create a high quality report.

There are 3 types of monthly reports:

1) Often a monthly status report is provided to the supervisor as an update of employee’s plans and activities. Most probably, it will also go to the manager of the supervisor as an input to his own report. It also serves as documentation of employee’s work history, and it’s a good reference during annual performance reviews.

2) Monthly project report. This type of report does not require as many details as a weekly project report does, but it provides a higher-level view of the developments in the project. Stakeholders would usually be interested in tracking the budget, expenditures, the quality of project outputs, and the risks, challenges, and issues affecting the project.

3) On the other hand, contractors also provide a monthly progress report to give the client a head’s up on where the project is, at the moment. Because of their setting, the client and the contractor might not see each on a regular basis. The client himself might not have enough time to monitor the developments of the project. In this situation, a monthly project status report also serves as a vital medium of communication between the contractor and the client so the report should be as detailed as possible.

A monthly report is a presentation of the activities and accomplishments of an organization for the previous month. The content of a monthly report typically includes:

– A summary of the company/department/person’s performance for the month

– Highlights from key projects that were completed during that period

– Projected goals for the next month

– Financial information about revenue, expenses, and profit margins (if applicable)

– Information about new hires or departures (if applicable)

Here are some tips on how to come up with a monthly status report which will effectively communicate the project developments to the top management, the stakeholders, or the clients:

• Provide a short description of the project that is brief yet concise. It does not need to be too detailed as its primary purpose is just to inform the management and the client of what this project is all about. . Project managers should also keep in mind that they need to practice honesty, transparency, and integrity in reporting since top executives can be surprisingly sharp in remembering even the smallest, most trivial details.
• Presenting related data may be easier through tables, graphs, and charts. Visual presentation makes reporting easier since readers can immediately see trends through the use of lines and bars. However, do check first whether the data to be presented graphically or in a tabular form will accurately represent the trend that the executives need to see.
• Do not use too many technical terms or concepts in the report.  Abbreviations should be spelled out the first time it will be used in the report, followed by its abbreviated form, so that the readers will be guided on what it means.
• Good formatting of the report increases readability. Using a single type and size of font throughout the whole report creates a consistent view. Emphasize different sections and subsections of the report by making the text bold or underlining them. It shows that the following portion is distinct from the previous one and it signifies that a new topic or area is coming up.
• Allow time to make the report. Cramming is not a good thing, especially in report writing, when the primary goal is to capture the development and progress of a project. The project manager or the writer of the report may need to sift through various details and information to come up with a comprehensive report.

A monthly report should be written in an objective manner and avoid subjective opinions.

A monthly report should be concise and should not contain unnecessary details or information that is irrelevant to the topic at hand.

The format of a monthly report may vary depending on what it is used for (i.e., whether it is for internal use or external use).

It is important to have an objective in mind before beginning the monthly report. This will help you stay focused and not get distracted with irrelevant information.

Objectives for a monthly report could be:

1) To summarize performance for the month

2) To identify what went well and what didn’t go well

3) To establish a plan of action for next month

What Does a Monthly Report Contain?

It is important to have a specific template for your monthly report so that you can be consistent. This will help you stay on track with all the necessary information that needs to be included in it.

Last Month’s Activities

Accomplishments for the month, plans for the next month, issues and concerns.

Keep in mind that the report should be free from any errors, grammatical or typographical, and it should also be noted that the quality of the report reflects the personality and professionalism of its writer.

Monthly status reports also help the team and the company reflect on what they can accomplish during the month and determine which among the initiative made are producing positive outcomes.

Valuable and action-oriented, monthly status reports should also state the next steps for the project, team, or company. Enterprises or organizations may have a standard format or template for a monthly status report which asks for a particular set of information about the project or performance targets that the management would inform with.

If you don’t have a template, here are some guidelines to create a monthly status report that will clearly reflect all the accomplishments in a given month.

Provide necessary information that will identify why the monthly progress report was made., write a brief summary of what the project or performance goal is all about., the most significant content is the accomplishments of the team’s project development., provide details on the tasks performed by the team for the month., support the details presented in the monthly status report..

Try to keep the report within one to two pages: enough to update the readers about the project, and not to take too much time from the users.

Monthly Report Template: Free Download Section

Click Here to Download Monthly Project Report Template XLSX

Click Here to Download Monthly Report Template DOC

Click Here to Download Monthly Progress Report With Invoice DOC

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Templates on ProsperForms:

Edit and use this template

Additional Sources

• How to Conduct an Effective Monthly Meeting + Free Sample Agenda
• How to Write an Impressive Weekly Project Report + Free Template Download
• How to Write a Quarterly Status Report + Free Template Download

5 Tips for Writing Better Monthly Reports

Project reporting is a useful tool for both on-project and off-project management entities. The monthly progress report is typically a book of record and can be called upon in a legal dispute. It’s the professional responsibility of all project members to accurately report the project to the best of their ability with the available data at the time.

The monthly report is also a tool used to help influence impactful change on a project. But if no one reads the report or it’s too confusing, it loses its purpose and effectiveness. Here are five tips you should consider when preparing your monthly reports to make them add substantial value to the project.

Visual Graphics

Wherever possible, substitute; text with a table or figure. You’ve heard the saying “A picture is worth a thousand words,” well nothing could be more true when it comes to creating simple, easy-to-understand reports. Large amounts of data are easily explained through the use of charts and other metrics. We follow the rule that the higher up the food chain your report goes, the more important it is to summarize the data to a “fifth grade level.” We are by no means saying that senior managers are fifth graders, but their time is limited, and a confusing text-driven report can leave them uninformed about the real project issues.

Split Long Complicated Sentences into Short Meaningful Statements

Many project team members make the mistake of typing long-winded sentences when much more could be said with less. Project reports aren’t meant to be entertaining. They’re supposed to be loaded with facts, figures and observations. A good report should represent where the project is, where it’s going, the critical issues and how those issues are being addressed.

Use a Table of Contents  WITH Page Numbers

Many times a reader only needs one fact, figure or statement from your monthly report. Do them a favor and make it easy to find the information they need quickly. Make sure each section is well-named and represented in the table of contents WITH page numbers. Nothing irritates readers more than when they pick up a report, and the table of contents doesn’t have page numbers. If you’re going to exclude page numbers, just call it a “Report Outline” rather than “Table of Contents.”

Refer to Attachments in the Body Text

Report attachments are included to provide readers with more detail when necessary. Use the report to make a statement or an observation and refer the reader to the specific attachments in case they’d like to see the supporting data or details.

Write a Strong Executive Summary

A monthly report is not a college dissertation. The truth is most readers won’t go beyond the executive summary, and many will only read a few other sections. Use the executive summary to get your point across and influence actionable change on the project. If there are issues, don’t be afraid to state them. Burying issues will only come back to haunt the project team if they’re not addressed immediately.

To learn more about Nexus PMG and our services, contact us at 972.905.9045 or via email at [email protected] .

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• What Is a Monthly Reporting Template? (And Some Templates To Help You)

Creating a monthly report can be an arduous task for team managers. But a great way to save time and make sure that you’re not missing anything is to use a template. A monthly reporting template is a pre-defined format that outlines the core essential components of any team’s performance report, such as project progress, customer feedback, accomplishments, goals achieved, and more. This provides teams with an efficient way to stay organized and track their performance each month, allowing them to quickly generate accurate results and reports in no time. 

Here’s how they work — with a few templates you can use right now!

What is a monthly reporting template?

Monthly reports are common in project and team management. Project managers might prepare a monthly report to let stakeholders know how a project evolves as time goes on, or even let individual collaborators know where specific blockers are. Similarly, a team might get together once a month to sum up everything they’ve done, find places where they can improve, and plan for the coming month. If you don’t want to start from scratch, a monthly reporting template can be an incredibly valuable resource.

These templates can take different forms depending on your organization’s needs, but they’ll always do one thing: break down information into straightforward categories. It’s tempting to dump a ton of data into your reports and call it a day, but you have to ensure you’re always thinking about the reader. Otherwise, you’re just sending work hours down the drain.

What needs to be included in a monthly reporting template?

The elements you include in your monthly reports depend entirely on what the report is actually for, but you’ll find that the broad strokes are pretty similar across them all. Let’s break it down.

Things you should include in a company-wide monthly reporting template

This is the kind of report a CEO might present at an all-hands meeting , show to potential investors, or even just share with teams ad-hoc as needed. Here’s what it should include.

• An overview of recent changes in the organization and how they’ll impact the coming months.
• A review of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
• Financial information, such as cash flow and expenses.
• Projections for coming months.
• A quick analysis of customer trends for coming months.
• Quick updates on the organization’s various departments.
• Human resources updates.
• Next steps.

A monthly report like this can give everyone in the company a better idea of how things are going, and it’s a great jumping-off point for asking productive questions.

What to include in a project management monthly reporting template

Project managers often prepare reports for stakeholders, individual collaborators, and even team leads throughout the organization. Here’s what they’ll include in their reports.

• A timeline of project milestones and important deadlines achieved so far.
• A breakdown of how resources have been used so far.
• An overview of changes, delays, or issues that came up and how they’ll adapt.
• A forecast of upcoming tasks.
• Planned timeline adjustments if necessary.
• Progress updates.
• Clear strategies for improving processes and dealing with blockers.

With this kind of report, project managers can avoid a lot of repetitive questions by just pointing people to what they’ve written.

What a monthly team reporting template needs to have

Project managers and CEOs aren’t the only ones that work with monthly reports. Teams often need to have some kind of reporting workflow to keep leaders and other teams aware of what they’ve been working on. A manager will often take care of this report; though sometimes it might only be shared with a department head or a vice president. Here’s what this kind of report might look like.

• An analysis of the team’s accomplishments over the past month.
• Performance reviews for each team member.
• An overview of any issues encountered by the team and how they were resolved.
• KPIs tracking the progress of big projects or initiatives the team has been working on.
• A summary of changes made within the team, including hires and departures.
• Proposed strategies for improvements to the team’s processes.

Managers might create this report alone, or they’ll ask for help from individual team members who self-report on their performance.

What tool should you use for your monthly reporting template?

So now that you know what your monthly reporting template should have in it, where should you keep it? You have a few options to work with, depending on how much work you want to put in your template — and how available it needs to be.

• Your project management tool: A lot of project management tools have built-in reporting features, including pre-made templates, meaning you can create your reports right where your work is happening.
• A spreadsheet tool: Tools like Google Sheets and Excel are flexible enough to do just about anything, and they’re commonly used for reporting. They’re great for tracking budgets and other resources.
• Data visualization tools: Of course, a tool that’s specialized for data will be useful for creating your reports.

3 monthly reporting templates

Marketing report for notion.

Your marketers will love this monthly reporting template, since it’ll save them a bunch of time on their reporting tasks.

Automated Google Sheets report

With a little help from Unito, you can automatically sync your work from tools like Trello and Asana to this Google Sheets template. No more manual reports!

Template for Word

Want to share monthly reports with the rest of the company without learning any new tools? Here’s a great template for Microsoft Word that covers all the bases.

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How to Write a Monthly Report

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Writing a monthly report serves as an important tool for communicating your achievements and ongoing projects to your employer. The report creation process can also provide you and your team with accountability as you assess your most recent performance and productivity levels. Monthly reports should generally be brief, but also comprehensive, listing major activities and actions taken, as well as goals for the upcoming month.

Title and Label

To ensure that anyone reading your report understands what it's about, be sure to title and label the report clearly and accurately, with critical information such as the type of report, the time period covered by the report, the date of report submission, department or team name and your own name.

COMPLIANCE TEAM MONTHLY REPORT for JANUARY 2020

Compiled by: Jane Reed

Submitted on: February 3rd, 2020

Before submitting your first monthly report, find out from your supervisor whether there's a specific template you should use. If your company or department doesn't have a template, ask your supervisor if he has any preferences regarding the construction of your report.

Present Accomplishments and Statuses

Use bulleted lists to briefly present all that has been accomplished during the month, as well as the status of any ongoing projects.

• Completed line-by-line review of each state's regulatory requirements for appraisal licensing.
• Submitted approval applications for approval of Introduction to Real Estate Appraisal to Illinois, New York and Montana; expected turnaround is three weeks for Illinois, four to six weeks for New York and Montana.
• Received course approval from Alabama and Georgia.
• Attended industry conference in California.
• Completed certification process for developing continuing education.

Describe Goals for the Coming Month

Your monthly report should also describe the planning that you're doing for the upcoming month. While this doesn't have to be a lengthy section, it should reinforce that you, and your team, have set challenging goals for the near future.

Goals and Plans for March 2020

• Begin review of real estate broker licensing laws for all 50 states.
• Submit Intermediate Appraisal course approval applications to South Carolina, Arkansas, Texas and Indiana.
• Stephen and Christine will attend the quarterly meeting of the Florida Appraisal Board in Orlando.
• Begin course architecture process for three new real estate CE courses.

Provide Summary

When appropriate, provide a summary of where things stand either for your team or in your own work.

January 2020 was a productive month for the compliance team. We completed our review of state regulations on appraisal licensing, submitted three course approval applications to state regulatory bodies, received course approval from two states, attended a networking event in California and completed a nine-month certification process so we can move forward in developing continuing education programs. Special credit goes to Julie Connor for her diligent work in contacting 50 regulatory boards by phone and email to ensure that our data was accurate.

">Other Considerations

Here are some other considerations that may help you in creating a useful report:

• Your supervisor may ask you to provide a brief financial summary of expenses during the month. Creating a table inside your document may be the best way to present your numbers. 
• While the goal of a monthly report is to provide a brief summary of your activities during the month, it is also essential to recognize colleagues who were part of your team or who assisted you. Be sure to name them in the report and, of course, ensure that their names are spelled correctly.
• Review previous reports when crafting a new one. Some projects and activities, such as submitted applications to state agencies, can take a significant amount of time to complete. Make sure that you provide an accounting for everything you've done and accomplished.
• Funds for NGOs: How NGOs can write Monthly Project Reports

Lainie Petersen is a full-time freelance writer living in Chicago. She holds a master’s degree in library and information science from Dominican university and spent many years working in the publishing, media and education industries. Her writing focuses on business, career and personal finance issues. Her work appears on a variety of sites, including MoneyCrashers, Chron, GoBankingRates and 8th & Walton News Now.

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5 monthly reporting templates and must-know tips

Monthly reports are an excellent tool for keeping team members and stakeholders updated on things like project statuses, company goals and milestones, department performance, and a broad range of other pertinent information. 

However, generating numerous reports each month can often be an overwhelming task. Today, most project managers rely on monthly report templates to streamline this process and ensure that all the most important details are covered.

To help you generate high-quality reports easily, let's take a look at everything you need to know about monthly reporting templates. Below, we'll cover what a monthly report is, the types of monthly reports companies should consider creating (along with free templates for each), and some actionable tips for writing better monthly reports.

What is a monthly report?

A monthly business report can take several forms and serve several purposes. The goal of these reports is to track monthly activities and progress across projects or departments. While annual reports or weekly reports make more sense in certain contexts, the monthly cadence is popular because it helps teams stay on top of happenings without getting bogged down in overwhelming weekly details.

The most common type of monthly report is an overview of the company's finances, including an expense report and a revenue report. As we'll discuss in the next section, though, numerous other types of monthly reports can also provide value to a company:

Monthly project reports to keep team members updated on project progress that was made the previous month

Monthly management report that covers goals and KPIs for the next month

Team member performance reports designed to provide personalized evaluations for individual team members

5 types of monthly business reports

As promised, here are the five types of monthly business reports that your company should consider creating. Along with covering each type of report format and why it’s useful, we've also provided a high-quality template for each one. These templates will serve as great starting points to help you generate your own reports more quickly and easily!

1) Monthly project status report

A monthly project status report serves as an activity report designed to keep team members and stakeholders updated on a project's status. These reports can include project milestones, a summary of the work that's already been completed, a summary of the work that still needs to be done, resource utilization , important upcoming goals, and potential issues and roadblocks. 

The primary purpose of monthly project status reports is to keep team members involved with the project informed and on the same page. However, you can also provide these reports to clients and investors who have a vested interest in the project's success to keep them updated.

Monthly project status report template

If you would like to utilize a project report template to generate your monthly project status reports , check out Teamwork's project tracker template . This progress report template makes it easy to map your project workflow for streamlined reporting and a clearer understanding of how your project is progressing.

2) Monthly financial report

A monthly financial report is the most common type of monthly report that companies generate. It updates team members and investors regarding the company's financial standing. There is a broad range of metrics that a financial report can include, like cash flow data, an evaluation of your assets and liabilities, profitability measurements, and shareholder equity analysis. 

Whatever information you choose to cover, though, generating monthly financial reports ensures that everyone stays informed on the company's financial standing and how to make it more profitable.

Monthly financial report template

Creating monthly financial reports requires you to cover a lot of metrics and information, and using a financial analytics report template is a great way to speed up the process. Try this financial report template from Template.net to get started.

3) Department performance report

A department performance report is a type of monthly report provided to individual departments within your company — for example, creating separate performance reports for your sales, marketing, and customer support departments. These reports provide a broad overview of department performance by covering department goals and KPIs, performance issues to address, and department objectives for the next month.

Monthly department performance report template

Teamwork.com's business goals template and OKR template are both high-quality reporting templates that you can use to generate monthly department performance reports.

4) Individual team member performance report

Personalized performance reports are an excellent tool for motivating individual team members, holding them accountable, and providing them with actionable advice on improving their performance. You can use these reports to point out performance issues, highlight examples of excellent performance, set performance goals, review past performance goals, and provide advice on how they can improve performance.

Monthly individual report template

If you are going to generate unique reports for each individual member of your team, streamlining the process via reporting templates becomes especially important. This performance appraisal template by Indeed is one great resource that you can easily modify to meet your needs.

5) Overall business monthly progress report

An overall monthly business progress report is designed to paint a broad picture of your company's current standing in the market. This type of report can include elements like financial information, objectives and key results, milestones and company goals, and updates on project progress . 

Much of this information will be covered more compressively in other monthly reports, such as your financial report and project status reports. However, an overall business monthly progress report is meant to provide an overview of these crucial updates, helping keep team members, clients/customers, and investors updated on your company's progress.

Monthly overall business report template

If you would like to utilize a template to create your overall business monthly progress reports, check out Continuous Improvement Toolkit's Monthly Performance Report Template . You can also use Teamwork's business goals template to map out your company's overall goals for the month.

Essential tips for writing a strong monthly report

Templates are an excellent tool for speeding up the process of creating monthly reports and ensuring that all essential details are covered. But even if you use templates to create your monthly reports, it's still important to make them as effective as possible. Here are a few key tips to keep in mind when writing monthly reports:

Write a solid executive summary

Your report's executive summary serves as your final opportunity to hammer home key messages and insights. Like it or not, it's also the section of your reports that people are most likely to actually read and absorb. This makes it essential to write a solid executive summary and capitalize on this final chance to make sure that you are getting the biggest points across. You can do this by identifying the most noteworthy points of your report and then creating a brief, well-organized summary that clearly highlights them.

Use a table of contents for quick reference

Along with using visual elements throughout your reports, another way to make your reports more accessible and digestible is to include a table of contents. This allows anyone reading the report to quickly find the specific information they're looking for. 

Always include monthly goals or OKRs

According to recent research from BI WORLDWIDE , employees with goals are 3.6 times more likely to be committed to their organization and 14.2 times more likely to be inspired at work. Regardless of what you are reporting on or the type of monthly report you're generating, monthly reports present a great opportunity to update your team members on key goals and objectives. Covering goals or objectives and key results (OKRs) in your monthly reports helps keep your team members aligned and working toward common objectives while also serving as a source of inspiration and motivation.

Collect data from multiple sources and keep it organized

No matter what type of monthly report you create, data and metrics are key components. This makes it critical to ensure that you source high-quality data and present it in a way that makes its insights clear. 

One tip to improve the quality of the data you include in your monthly reports is to source data from multiple sources. Utilizing multiple data sources helps eliminate the potential for errors while providing broader and more detailed insights. Once you have sourced the data for your reports, organize and present it properly, using visual elements (charts, images, and infographics) to make the information digestible and highlight key insights.

Include visual elements wherever possible

Did you know that written information is 70% more memorable when a visual element accompanies it? If you want to ensure that the team members reading your reports can digest them, visuals are a great place to start. Presenting key metrics and information in graphs, charts, and infographics will make your reports easier to follow while simultaneously making them more pleasing to the eye. You can make your monthly reports even more visually appealing by utilizing photographs, different colors, and custom fonts.

Turn long sentences into short, meaningful statements

Research has shown that sentence length is the second-biggest predictor of readability , second only to word length and familiarity. If you want them to actually read and understand your reports, you need to make them as easily digestible as possible. Along with presenting data visually, breaking up long, confusing sentences into shorter, more meaningful statements is one effective way to make your reports more readable.

Create better monthly reports with Teamwork

Monthly reports are one key aspect of keeping teams organized and aligned. With Teamwork, you can leverage highly customized monthly reports to enable smarter decision making. To get started enjoying the many advantages of Teamwork's world-class project management platform built for client work, be sure to https://www.teamwork.com/signup/ sign up for Teamwork today!

Síle is a Senior Content Marketing Manager at Teamwork.com. She has been working in the project management software space for over 7 years, exclusively serving the agency sector. She loves providing agencies with actionable insights and captivating content to help navigate the ever-evolving landscape of project management.

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38+ Monthly Report Examples & Samples in PDF | Word | Pages | Google Docs

Monthly Report

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Building a Custom Monthly Summary Report from Scratch

To build a custom monthly summary report from scratch:

• In the Reports menu, select Report Builder .
• Click the New report button.

The available report types relate to the WorkflowMax database tables such as lead, job or the WIP Work In Progress in WorkflowMax is all uninvoiced staff time and disbursements recorded on client jobs. ledger. In most cases, it's easy enough to choose the report type that contains the data you want to report on. However, you may sometimes need to experiment to find where the data item you want is actually stored.

For example, the ‘Monthly staff expenses’ sample report is actually based on the Job Cost data table. This is because expenses are stored in the Job Cost table, although you might expect them to be stored in a table called 'staff'.

• In the Report layout drop-down list, select Monthly Summary and click Create .

This option does not save the report. However, you can navigate back to the Report Designer without losing your work. It is better to use the Save (and preview) option to avoid any chance of losing the changes you've made.

• Save . Saves the report and returns to the Report builder > My reports screen.
• Save (continue editing) . Saves your work and remains in the Report Designer screen.

From the preview, you can export or print the report as follows:

• Export to CSV or XML.
• Print . Displays a print dialog from where you can select printer options.