If you want to grow your business, you need to check how it is doing before considering any future plans. With a Monthly Business Report, you will know every department's state and find out what needs improvement to ensure healthy business growth. 

Here you will see a deep guideline for writing a Monthly Report for different aspects of your business.

A Monthly Report is a data analysis tool that summarizes all important activities, operational information, and data collected in a particular month. 

Through strong and clear data visualization, executives can use these reports to showcase certain performances, results, and problems they may encounter. 

Reports have become common practice within any big company and small business alike since it’s one of the most effective tools to keep high-ranking members informed about every activity that is going on. When everyone is up to date about the business, they can work together on planning future strategies.

Monthly Reports help you gain insight into powerful hiding data and track the status and progress of their strategies and goals. 

Anyone can create a modern reporting process quickly and with just a few clicks. It doesn’t require high technical skills to do it. 

And these are just a few benefits of the many we’ll see next. 

Evaluate Financial Performance

With Monthly Financial Reports, you can check your business performance and financial health.

You will clearly see budget spending and justify it in front of investors and relevant stakeholders. You can get a visual overview and ensure everything is being spent correctly.

Check the Progress of your Business

With these reports, you can measure the overall company’s performance and check if it aligns with your goals. 

This will enable the implementation of new strategies along the way or tune the ones the business is encouraging. 

Recognize Trends and Come up With New Strategies

One can closely monitor the current values and compare them to the previous month by checking on past data. This insight provided by monthly reports will let us formulate new strategies and improve our decision-making.

You can also use these reports to compare them with competitors and market standards.

Minimize Risks by Monitoring Data

By getting a good level of insight every month, we can mitigate any risk that may cause harm to the company. 

Reviewing the budget and preparing for future market fluctuations will minimize the risk of errors, and we can spot inefficiencies on time.

Any Monthly Business Report should be well-organized and easy to read and understand for stakeholders.

First of all, you must remember to whom you are making this report; think about your “Key Performance Indicators (KPI),” what your goal is, and what you want to show them. Once this is answered, you can plan out your Monthly Report.

But again, it should be easy to understand for your project managers. To achieve this concept, there are some guidelines that you can follow.

Cover Page

Start with a branded cover page. The first page is the first impression that everyone will get too. 

You should include the logo, name, address, and other key information that may seem necessary to write down.

Expected Targets and Values

Benchmark values should always be on your monthly reporting. 

You need to measure your business progress against pre-established goals to motivate team members, improve their work, and notice how far you are from achieving such objectives. 

Include value statements and vision at the beginning of your Monthly Report to refine your overall strategy.

Summary of Content

The main purpose of a Monthly Report is to provide information about your current business performance based on specific goals. Carefully pick your KPIs, as not all will help portray your objectives. 

Even if you intend to be as brief and consistent as possible, some reports could have many pages. So it would be smart to add a table of contents as some stakeholders or high-ranking members may be interested in some parts of the report.

Past Performance and Scorecards

Historical data plays a fundamental role in monthly reporting, providing valuable insight. Analyzing past data allows you to find trends and patterns that will help you better understand several aspects of your business. 

You can also use organizational scorecard views to include historical performance data and provide feedback to help make future decisions. This will clarify the readability of your various statements. Explain each of these so the management team can easily grasp the bigger picture.

Interactive Visualization: Graphs and Charts

Comprehensive and easy-to-read charts and graphs will improve the accessibility of your Monthly Report by a long shot. Always remember that everyone should be able to understand your statement. 

Carefully choose what kind of interactive visualization you use and which KPIs you will portray. There are many Monthly Report Templates (which we will see later) that will help you visualize your goals consistently.

Project Overview and Detailed Pages

There will be discussions at the monthly management meetings, but you don’t want to talk about every single detail. 

You should include a High-Level Overview with the most important information and leave the discussions for the project review meetings.

You already know what to do. Now, it’s time to write your Monthly Report. Luckily, there is also a guideline for starting this process and not getting lost or overwhelmed. So, let’s get started with it. 

Gather Data

The very first thing you need to do is gather all the information you need, and you will get it from their data sources.

Ask employees from different business departments to provide you with the paperwork and include observations about the company's situation. After all, it is your own report.

Analyze All Information Gathered and Filter the Important Data

Time to sit down and study all your data. Find out what led to certain outcomes. Make statements that will explain its causes and consequences. 

But beware, as you will receive large amounts of data, no matter how small the business may be. By filtering the most useful data weekly, you will have a better idea of what to include in your Monthly Report.

Set Strategic Goals and Objectives

Before starting, you need to check that your goals and strategies are lined up. By keeping this clear, you will understand which company affairs need to be addressed in the report.

Let stakeholders know next month’s objectives, so they can help you with your work.

Visualize the KPIs

Again, make good use of graphs and charts. Visualizing the most important metrics will make it easier for the readers to connect the different variables and get what you present in the report. 

Provide Solutions and Make It Available to Key Decision Makers and Stakeholders

If some problems come up during the month, make sure that you will present a couple of solutions. It will give your superiors a sense of control on your hands.

But they shouldn’t be left out of the process. With online reports, all the decision-makers can have an insight into the most recent information regarding the company’s performance. It will save you time as it won’t be necessary to arrange in-person meetings.

And if you need to make some “last-minute” changes or any small adjustments, you can do it right away from the online version.

Make It Simple and Well-Organized

Your superiors have to provide their input and catch up on the latest activities. If they can’t understand what you presented to them, it will slow down any kind of progress. 

Not everyone is accounted on some specific terminology. By simplifying the information, you will have a much easier time planning future strategies. 

You also need to clarify each department their deadlines to present their data to you, so you don’t fall behind on schedule. With a well-organized reporting process for every month, everything will be much more efficient and take less time.

Double-check Before Sending

Before you send it to your internal stakeholders, review one last time. 

It’s always a good idea to proofread and check all information you provided on the report accurately represents the overall performance and future strategies.

Depending on the focus that your report has, it can be categorized into three different kinds of Monthly Reports.

Monthly Status Report

A Monthly Project Status Report is frequently given to the supervisor as an update on the employee’s plans and activities. Most of the time, the Project Manager will get a copy too. 

This also acts as a record of an employee’s work history. It’s a useful resource during annual performance assessments. 

Monthly Project Report

This doesn’t require as many specifics as a weekly project report. But it provides a higher view of its development. 

The Monthly Project Reports are mostly useful for stakeholders as they are most interested in tracking the budget, project output quality, risks, and issues that may appear and influence the project.

Monthly Progress Report

Contractors create a Monthly Progress Report, giving the client an idea of where the project stands. 

Most of the time, contractors and clients may not see each other. That’s why a Monthly Progress Report acts as a critical communication channel between them so the report may be as complete as feasible.

Many businesses use a Monthly Report Template to present the company’s performance accurately.

They include the most important data from each department on their respective report template and track KPIs to make it understandable for everyone. 

We’ll show which are commonly used as a report template, so you have a better idea of picking one up. Or you can save time by picking an Excel template and import it into your document. If you need an Excel key, you can get MS Office CD key at low price on RoyalCDKeys.

Monthly Management Report

In Monthly Management Reports, you will track all your most important projects in one place. 

With this dashboard, your management team will monitor lots of details like all tracked time, billable hours, billable amounts split by projects, and many more.

The Management Report keeps everyone informed about the different stages of the project and its performance. 

Monthly Financial Report

A Monthly Financial Report consolidates all the fundamental fiscal data in one central place to ensure healthy financial growth. 

Depending on the template, it can show some key metrics like gross profit margin, expenses, income, sales goals, or net promoter score. You may find many different types, and you can choose the one that suits your needs. With graphs and clear colors, a template can easily show your stakeholders which metric improved and which are in loss. After that, you can go into more detail about what happened.

Next, the financial report provides a breakdown of the cost and revenue of different departments for the month, allowing you to closely monitor expenses and budget. 

It’s important to revisit these scores every month, as unhappy employees and customers can bring several financial hardships.

Monthly Sales Report

A Monthly Sales Report is used to monitor, analyze and determine sales trends. 

It can help sales representatives manage and track their monthly sales activities much more efficiently, as the sales department can also check their performance every month too.

As an example, we have this monthly sales report sample. Look at critical sales numbers such as revenue, profit, and cost. Each of them is compared to the past month's performance. With this report, you can easily understand if the business is reaching its goals.

Then, you can have more detailed breakdowns of these metrics. This is invaluable information to include on your monthly status report template as it gives managers a complete perspective on every sales process. 

It will allow us to dig deeper into the data and find opportunities for strong business decisions. You can download for free another example of Monthly Sales Report Template.

Monthly Marketing Report

With a Monthly Marketing Report, you can capture all of their efforts and gather some crucial data. Some examples are which traffic sources generate the most leads, tracking the number of new users (and how many become new customers), comparing traffic from email and blogs, and if the marketing efforts are paying off.

Monthly Social Media Report

It comes in handy with marketing, but you should look for social media metrics separately. Brands that don’t extract every piece of information from their channels will stay behind. 

For example, this monthly report template shows that every social media is divided into different fundamental metrics. These are tracked against a set target and the last report to understand whether their values increased quickly. 

Tracking these monthly will help accurately deliver progress reports to your managers or clients and give you time to enhance your social media performance. You can get this free template for Excel here.

Monthly Performance Report

With a Monthly Performance Report, you can track down employee performance. 

Managers can check how everyone is doing on their current tasks and ensure they are doing fine. 

It is fundamental as any inefficiencies can be dealt with immediately, like providing a training opportunity, so its performance won’t affect the whole team. 

Monthly SaaS Report

This is more specific for companies that use “Software as a Service.” With a Monthly SaaS Report, businesses should focus on the most relevant areas, e.g., customers, recurring, revenue, and operational cost. 

The template must be armed with historical data, keeping executives informed about every relevant indicator. 

These are all fundamental metrics to be tracked every month as they allow you to delve deeper into your ongoing operational cost. 

With it, you can optimize your process and understand the customers on a higher level.

Google Analytics Monthly Report

A standard Google Analytics report provides data for the last 30 days on a weekly and even daily basis so you can get a deeper understanding of your performance on search results. 

Seeing how data fluctuates depending on the country will help you refine your strategies and allocate resources more efficiently.

Making Monthly Reports will give you a better knowledge of many aspects of your business. 

You will get a brief analysis of your present performance and compare its past results and see what needs improvement. It's becoming a cornerstone of business development; without it, it will be hard to achieve healthy growth.

With pre-established templates, you won’t need a high IT skill to make it.  It’s pretty accessible for everyone.