How to write a business report
Have you been assigned the job of creating a report for your organization? Does that task seem downright daunting? It does not have to be. First, you or various people or departments within your organization have all the information you need to include. Second, it has plenty of examples and formatting help available to help you produce your report.
There are many types and lengths of reports. Some may be one page summaries and others may be hundreds of pages long. The most common report you will probably need to produce is a project report, where you summarize what the project was intended to accomplish and how well it met its objectives. But there are also meeting reports, status reports, monthly and quarterly reports, all kinds of study and research reports, and annual reports.
It is important to consider the audience for each type of report. Who will be your readers? Are they your colleagues who already know everything about your organization and your field, or do readers include people like shareholders and interested members of the general public for whom you’ll need to include background information and more detailed explanations?
Also consider the objectives of the report itself. Should they analyze and compare the results scientifically or does the report also have a marketing element? For example, annual reports summarize an organization’s activities and financial status, but annual reports typically also include sections listing the organization’s products or services and emphasizing its successes, because annual reports are used by shareholders and potential partners and investors to determine whether the organization is worth investing in.
Although each report will include information specific to that organization and its activities, all good reports follow a basic structure and include many of the same types of information.
Every report should include these sections within the body of the report:
Background (if necessary).
Goal(s) of the project, meeting, or study you are reporting on. For example, were you meeting to determine a new marketing strategy for the coming year? Has your organization recently migrated from one software system to another? Has your organization made an effort to improve safety or other conditions at work? Is your goal to compare the latest results of a process or the most recent sales of products or services with previous results?
Summary of the project, meeting or study.
Analysis of the decisions made or the results of the project. This section may include statistical summaries and patterns found in the data.
Recommendations. Did the project, meeting or study achieve its objectives? What are the implications for the future?
Appendices (if necessary).
The pages that go into each section will vary with each organization, project, and type of report. If you are writing a report about a short meeting, you may only have one or two pages that include the information mentioned above. For now, let’s assume you’re writing a longer report and explore the structure you’ll need.
As with any lengthy business document, you’ll start with a title page and a table of contents. Next, you may want to include a summary of important summary points for high-level readers who will just skim through your report; this is usually called an Executive Summary. In an organization’s annual report, this summary is usually included in a Letter to Shareholders written by the head of the organization.
If you need to include a Background section, this is where you will explain the history that led to the project, meeting, or study. Often this includes the reasons why a project or study was carried out. Including background will help readers understand what happened and help them judge the results. You may want to include the Needs Assessment and Affected Entities pages here as well.
In the Goals section, you will summarize the Goals and Objectives of the project, meeting, or study. In other words, what results was the project, meeting, or study intended to achieve? Be as specific as possible. You may need pages with titles like Customer Expectations or Expected Results, and don’t forget to include the original budget and schedule goals, as well as any constraints that were placed on the project.
In the Summary or Project Description section, you will describe what happened during the course of the project, meeting, or study. If you are writing a progress report during the course of a project, it will describe what happened from the beginning to the date of the report. If you’re writing a monthly, quarterly, or annual report, you’ll summarize the events in that specific time period. If you are writing a summary report after a project or study has been completed, you will be writing a description of the entire project.
Depending on the type of report you are writing, you may need pages such as Accounting, Acquisitions, Advertising, Awards and Achievements, Fieldwork, Cross Promotion, Data Collection, Diagnostics, Testing, Expenses, Experiments, Exploration, Research, Monitoring, Observations, Operating Costs, Events Calendar, Training, Profit and Loss Statement. This list of potential topics is endless, because the information you include in this section depends on the events you are reporting on. Use as many topics as you need to explain in detail what happened.
If you are writing an annual report for an organization or a report on a very complex project, this Summary section may need to be divided into subsections with descriptions of what happened in different departments within the organization, or what happened during different phases of the project. In these cases, you will need to gather that information from a variety of leaders who were in charge of different activities.
In the Analysis section, you will report on how well the expectations and objectives were met. You may need to explain how you collected the data behind the statistical measurements and how you determined whether the objectives were met. In this section, you can include pages with titles such as Measurements, Findings, Precision, Benchmark Results, Challenges, Estimates, Customer Satisfaction, Discoveries, Failures, Successes, Current Situation, and Performance.
Reports that include a lot of detailed financial information, such as an annual report, often include detailed explanations accompanying the financial figures, as well as a report from an independent auditor indicating that the financial information is accurate.
The final section of a report should be a Conclusions section. In this section, you can include topics such as Consequences, Significance, Revenue Projection, Lessons Learned, and Next Steps, whatever suits your purpose in concluding your report. In the case of a report that has a marketing or public relations purpose, topics such as Areas of Growth, Successes, and Future Potential are usually emphasized.
After the body of a complex financial or scientific report, you may also need to include Appendices: lists of statistics, diagrams, graphs, a bibliography or list of sources, etc.
You want your report to sound professional, so be sure to review each page. If possible, have someone unfamiliar with the information read and comment on your work. It’s always a good idea to choose a reviewer with a similar background to your readers so they can ask the right questions and provide useful feedback to improve your report.
Once you’ve written and edited all the information, work on making your report visually appealing. You can add color and graphics by incorporating your company logo, using colored borders, and selecting custom bullets and fonts.
Are you less intimidated now that you understand what is involved in writing a report? You should also know that you don’t need to start your report writing project looking at a blank page. You can find quite a few types of reports on the Internet to see what others have done. For annual reports, you can request several from organizations similar to yours to see what they have published.
Starting with a package of pre-built templates, such as a Proposal Kit, can give you a big boost with samples and all of your report content. Content libraries, like those in a proposal kit, contain sample reports as well as hundreds of theme templates for all the sections you’ll want to include in your report, including financial data.
Each template page in a report writing kit is professionally designed for a clean look and includes instructions and tips on the types of information to include on each page. The kits contain not only all the templates you’ll need for your report, but also all the templates you’ll use for business proposals and reports throughout the year.