Writing a project report is essential for your project’s health, but without automation and templates, it can be time-consuming to collect and organize all the data. Old-school, static reports often become outdated the moment they’re shared.
In this guide, we’ll show you how to write a project report that actually drives results. We’ll cover the key elements, a step-by-step process, and provide templates to help you create clear, helpful, and modern project reports in less time.
TL;DR: Effective project reports are less about static documents and more about live, automated dashboards that provide real-time insights. This guide shows you how to create reports that drive decisions by focusing on your audience, centralizing data, and leveraging tools like monday.com to automate the process.
What is a project report (and why is it crucial for success)?
A project report is a formal document that shares details about different areas of your project, from progress and budget to resources and risks. Its main goal is to improve decision-making by giving you, your team, and your stakeholders the ability to track project progress against the original plan.
Effective reporting keeps everyone informed and aligned, playing a vital role in your stakeholder engagement strategy. For instance, studies show that managers can spend a significant portion of their week just collecting data for manual reports-time that could be spent on strategic work. A good report simplifies gathering and sharing key project information, impacting your budget, timeliness, and overall project success.
The modern approach: Static reports vs. live dashboards
Traditionally, project reports are static documents like PDFs or spreadsheets. While detailed, they have a major flaw: they become outdated almost immediately. The manual effort required to compile them means they only offer a snapshot in time, often missing the latest developments.
The modern solution is a shift to live dashboards. Instead of a static document, a live dashboard provides a real-time, interactive view of your project data. It connects directly to your work, so the information is always current. This approach eliminates manual data collection, provides instant insights, and allows stakeholders to drill down into the details that matter most to them.
On monday.com, you can build customizable, shareable Dashboards that serve as your single source of truth, ensuring everyone is making decisions based on the most accurate and up-to-date information.
Key elements every project report must include
While the project report format can vary, every comprehensive report should include several core components to provide a complete picture of the project’s status.
Executive summary
A brief overview of the project’s status, key accomplishments, and major challenges. This is for stakeholders who need a high-level update quickly.
Project goals and objectives
A reminder of what the project aims to achieve. This helps frame the progress and results in the context of the original plan.
Progress against milestones and timeline
An update on completed tasks, upcoming milestones, and the overall project timeline. Visual aids like Gantt charts are especially effective here.
Budget and resource utilization
An analysis of expenses versus the budget and how resources are being allocated. This is critical for keeping the project on track financially. For more on this, check out our guide to Resource Management.
Risks, issues, and blockers
A transparent look at any challenges or potential problems that could impact the project’s success, along with proposed mitigation plans.
Key decisions and next steps
A summary of important decisions made during the reporting period and a clear outline of the immediate next steps.
Use our Single Project Template to ensure you cover all these elements from day one.
How to write a project report in 5 steps
Step 1: Define your audience and objective
Before you write a single word, know who you’re writing for and what you want them to take away. An executive team needs a high-level summary, while a project team needs granular details on tasks and blockers. Tailoring the content and level of detail to your audience makes the report infinitely more useful.
Step 2: Gather and centralize your data
Collecting data from different spreadsheets, emails, and tools is a huge time sink. The key is to have a single source of truth where all project information lives.
monday.com tip: Centralize all your project data on a single monday.com board. Track tasks, timelines, budgets, and files in one place to eliminate manual data collection forever.
Step 3: Structure your report and visualize data
Organize your data around the key elements listed above. Don’t just present numbers-visualize them. Use charts, graphs, and timelines to make complex information easy to understand at a glance.
monday.com tip: Build a live Dashboard with customizable widgets. Use the Chart Widget to show budget breakdowns, the Gantt view to display timelines, and the Workload Widget to monitor team capacity.
Step 4: Draft the narrative and add context
Data tells you what is happening, but the narrative explains why it’s happening. Add context to your data, explain the story behind the numbers, and highlight key insights. This is where a report transforms from a data dump into a powerful decision-making tool.
monday.com tip: Use the monday.com AI Assistant to summarize progress updates or draft key takeaways, helping you build the narrative faster.
Step 5: Review, share, and automate
Proofread your report for clarity and accuracy. Once it’s ready, share it with your stakeholders. But don’t stop there-automate the process for the next time.
monday.com tip: Share a link to your live monday.com Dashboard so stakeholders always have access to real-time information. Use our Automations to send weekly status updates to your team’s Slack channel or email stakeholders when a milestone is reached.
See how it works: Build a live project report dashboard in minutes.
Types of project reports you can create in monday.com [with templates]
You can split project reports into different types and categories. Here are five different types of project management reports, with monday.com templates you can customize for your unique project and team set-up.
1. Project status report
Probably the most frequently used, a project status report offers a general overview of the current status of your projects. A project status report answers the question: “How likely is it that we’ll complete this project on time without overrunning costs?”
These reports analyze whether you’re meeting project goals and key performance indicators. With our single project template, creating a status report is easier than ever.
2. Resource workload report
Resource workload reports help you visualize what your team’s working on, when they’re working on it, and how much work is left. These also reports help you understand how your assets are being used and make sure your actions are aligned with the overall objective.
Our resource management template helps you organize all your assets, locations, and people into one place and track every action with accuracy. You can also manage your resource allocation initiatives and make sure you don’t assign the same resource twice in multiple tasks.
3. Portfolio report
Portfolio reports take a look at all your projects and consolidate all the data into a single document. These reports capture high-level milestones, status, progress, and highlights of your portfolio strategy.
With our portfolio management template, you can track unlimited projects on a single board and get a quick snapshot of their health and profitability.
4. Task list/Time-tracking report
Time-tracking reports, also known as timesheets, help you measure how your team is spending their time and spot potential bottlenecks.
With our team task list template, you can bring in your entire organization, assign tasks to peers, track time and measure the project progress at a glance.
5. Expense report
A project might seem healthy – until everyone starts reporting expenses at the end of the time period. With our expense tracking template, you can proactively manage your cash flow regardless of your accounting skills (or lack thereof!)
Stop writing reports. Start building live dashboards.
Ready to ditch static reports? Build dynamic, real-time dashboards that keep everyone aligned, automatically. See for yourself how monday.com transforms project reporting from a tedious task into a strategic advantage.
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