Weekly and Monthly Reports in Excel
These kinds of essential management reports enable businesses to monitor progress throughout the organization. For example, employees may write weekly reports for their managers, while managers can certainly explain to their executives or business owners with regards to their weekly achievements and other work in progress activities and plans.
Weekly and monthly reports assist the management assignments to stick to the plan and make sure all employees perform their expected duties and responsibilities. Furthermore, management reports help managers do better performance evaluations and employee performance reviews since they record the ongoing results of their employees.
Every good report starts with a clear heading – explaining to the reader what the report is all about. While this might sound obvious think about how many times have you looked at presentations, emails and reports and wondered what is the point of reading them. Use brief headings which are straight to the point and effective.
Your heading is not effective if people looking at your report are not sure what is it about and they need to make their own conclusions. Examples of effective report titles are “Weekly Sales Report“, “Monthly Quality Report” and “Weekly Financial Performance Report“.
If your report is more than 1-2 pages long it is always a good idea to create a brief summary using a couple of paragraphs that will wrap up your information. This particular overview provides your manager an overall review of your own duties for that week or month.
Next, create a short checklist (like simple table or bullet points) with the most important tasks and results for the week. Focus on the job you completed throughout the week within this section. In this part, you may also incorporate any kind of meetings that occurred or perhaps additional activities which you have completed.
Be aware that the importance of your job must be aligned with the company goals and objectives so you have to focus your report on work that will play a role in achieving the overall business objectives (ideally your results should directly help your overall company’s results). Describe your tasks and projects which are still work in progress – they have not been fully completed yet and they must be reported in terms of a short progress report.
Explain the status of each task, expected completion date and compare the job progress against the predefined project plan and budget to show that your job is on track and within the expectations. If you have many work in progress projects it is a good idea to create a section called – status of work in progress activities and organize them in an easy to read way.
Finally, establish you next week’s and next month’s objectives. When you manage to link current activities with the future plans in a nice way it gives your boss a clear idea of your job and the value you create for the business.
Your targets for the next month or week will incorporate virtually any things that you record within the “work in progress” part of the report. In addition specify travel, meetings, customer visits, important tasks…. depending on your job requirements.
You want to keep the your report not more than 1-2 pages. For better presentation make use of bullet points whenever possible so it will be less complicated for the manager to find out the important information.
One of the frequently used monthly and weekly reports is the “Weekly/Monthly Sales Report”. Typically the sales performance is vital to any successful company. In certain organizations, product sales are usually monitored on a weekly and monthly basis so management gets the latest snapshot of exactly how sales are performing and in addition how individual sales teams, reps and marketing channels are performing compared to their goal to fulfill the sales targets. This report needs to be kept as simple as possible.
Use an effective report template to highlight the critical information in an easy way for your boss. For example in sales reports try to summarize your top KPIs (based on how your performances are measured) and show the trends and developments over the week and month as well as compare them to the previous weeks or months. Excel charts are most effective to show trends such as growth in sales or any other sales metric like conversion, lead generation or sales by product/service.
Excel charts and excel reports will improve your report and save you time.
As explained above, use a clear title like “Weekly Sales Scorecard” and focus on your critical sales metrics. Try to keep the report on one page – even when you need to include more information a good report template should be able to summarize the info into a nice and brief presentation (see dashboard templates for excel for more information and the KPI planning guide for managers).
Offer a professional framework and logical flow of information for your sales data – for example start with your revenue, sales and margins and next go into details such as sales performance per customer or product type. This approach makes sense for the reader to understand your sales results and activities even without talking to you.
Once you have your monthly and weekly report templates in place you can use them over and over again (week after week and month after month). By following this approach you will benefit from time savings on an ongoing basis and you will be able to better communicate your accomplishments and results to your boss and your team.