When it comes to project work, reporting is rarely the part people get excited about. But you simply can’t make informed decisions, communicate fluidly with clients or gauge how your project is performing without them. A good project report will provide enough detail about your KPIs without being overwhelming, and keep manual effort to a minimum.
While you may still never like project reporting, these days there are countless tools and templates available to make it infinitely easier. Aside from streamlining the reporting process, they also help you keep reports interesting, attractive and informative. Some even let you share live updating reports, so you don't have to keep updating and exporting a routine report. Here are five of the best project report templates we’ve found for an easier life.
Versatile project reporting templates
TeamGantt
The TeamGantt project report template is super easy to adopt, summarizing the headers, bullets, and tables that should always be featured in an effective report. It helps you report budget updates efficiently, allowing you to share the remaining overall project budget as well as the specific budget for individual tasks… so no colleagues or clients will ever be in the dark as to how much money is left! The report template even helps with actioning tasks and keeping track of to-do lists, too: in the weekly status report there’s a table where you can keep tabs of everything outstanding and assign tasks to individual people or teams, so everyone knows what their responsibilities are and nothing falls by the wayside.
Timely
Timely’s sophisticated project reporting tool lets you create and share gorgeously-designed project reports in a matter of clicks. Choose from one of Timely’s clean, professionally-designed reports, or use the simple chart builder to build your own from scratch. Unlike most project reporting tools, Timely lets you share a live report with stakeholders, so that any new information added to your project updates live in the report. You can share reports via a secure private URL, or export them as .xls, .pdf or .csv files. Timely even shows your reporting history, so you check whether people have looked at your report and who has access to them.
Workamajig
Workamajig report templates are excellent for returning real-time insights that help project progress, as well as effectively communicating current status. The reports are quick to prepare and can be easily shared with internal team members or clients, and updates are always in real-time, with every change or new piece of communication being instantly conveyed. Workamajig’s reporting templates also help streamline the feedback process to keep you on schedule, making it easier to get quick approval from clients about new ideas or proposed changes. You can also integrate budget tracking and insights into your reports to ensure you’re meeting targets and allocating resources as efficiently as you can.
Filestage
Filestage offers a super-basic template report for easy reporting. The template itself is pre-built, but you can customize it to your own needs with just a few clicks, so it’s a great framework for more intricate, in-depth project reports as well as simple ones. With clean visuals, you’ll get a comprehensive view of project status, and the ability to make notes means communication and updates are easier than ever. Because you don’t need to be logged in or have an account to see the report and the comments (or even reply to them), it’s ideal to send to clients to get their input, too. With inbuilt task automation capabilities, you won’t waste time on repetitive tasks and can focus on meaningful project work instead.
Microsoft Office
For simple and concise project reporting templates, Office’s free template library is ideal. You can build, create and personalize eye-catching graphical reports without the use of any other software. You never need to include manual updates, as all report templates update to reflect the most recent information as you go along – no matter the type of data you’re working on. You can summarize project status, give an outline of the project’s most important tasks, budget and concerns, and use graphs and tables to visualize each project phase, upcoming objectives, and overdue tasks. With dashboard reports, resource reports, cost reports and progress reports, Office Project is one of the best free templates out there.
