![How to Write an Effective Monthly Report [+ Templates]](https://visme.co/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/How-to-Write-an-Effective-Monthly-Report-Header.jpg)
Do you want to make better decisions as a manager or business owner and grow your business? Creating a monthly report is an excellent way to do that. But what does it take to write one? A good report should be clear and concise, with an overview of the month's activities and key findings.
Fortunately, a monthly report template can help you write a report in minutes. In this guide, we will discuss how to write a monthly report and share some monthly report templates with you.
If you are ready to create a monthly report, use Visme's online report maker. Choose a template and customize it in the Visme editor to make it your own.
Here’s a short selection of 8 easy-to-edit monthly report templates you can edit, share and download with Visme. View more templates below:
A monthly report is a summary of your business activities during a specific month. It provides an overview of key statistics, information about the company's financial position and a review of the performance of critical business units.
This report is usually prepared at the end of each month, although some companies may produce annual or weekly reports.
Here is a great monthly report example:
Customize one of these monthly report templates in the Visme editor to create your report.
Alternatively, try the Visme AI Document Generator , more specifically the Report Writer , to create a ready-to-use monthly report. Write the prompt in the chatbot including all the sections you need the report to feature, select one of the styles suggested and let the AI work its magic.
This template is for you if you are looking for a colorful, dynamic report to evaluate your business's customer service. The template will help you highlight essential information with bright colors and timeless fonts.
The design of this template thrives on its unique color combination. Replace the images and edit the text and other information to fit your industry and brand personality.
The principle of "less is more" is epitomized in this simple monthly reporting template. The template reduces the number of visual elements that your readers need to take in. Therefore, it will allow them to quickly absorb and digest all the information in a short amount of time.
The monthly project report template is designed for digital marketing teams to show their monthly performance. However, you can customize it for any business regardless of size or industry.
Visme's dynamic fields allow you to insert your information and automatically assign any necessary value. The best part is that you can update all the values in the fields across multiple projects at once.
You can watch the video tutorial below to learn more about it.
The bold colors, clean lines, bright hues and stunning images make this monthly client report template unique. Also, the vertical bar graph and line chart to show the retention, acquisition and ROI takes it to another level.
Visme offers a wide range of charts and graphs templates that you can use and replace the pre-existing ones in this template.
Are you looking for a sales or business monthly report that gives a corporate feel? Use this template to create your own right now. Show your budget allocation with professional-looking tables and the financials with graphs and data widgets.
Visme allows you to create tables for any industry in a few clicks with the pre-filled table options.
Grab your teammates' attention quickly in the next customer service meeting using this colorful monthly report template. Discuss issue types and response times, requests closed and other key metrics.
Using geometric shapes and colorful icons helps you creatively communicate your data. Also, the use of Visme's modern fonts makes the information pop.
Make your monthly analysis report more engaging using customizable vector icons, cool shapes and 3D animated graphics. Learn more about how to take advantage of these animated illustrations in this video below:
Are you looking for a template to create a report on how multiple departments across your organization perform? Then this creative monthly report template is the best for you.
On our monthly report examples, you can show organic search performance, paid advertising performance, social media performance, ROI, and more.
Give your reports a more realistic feel using Visme's interactive Flipbook effect. Your readers will feel they are holding an actual document using this feature.
This monthly marketing report template has a simple and clean design layout that can easily attract your readers. With the marketing strategies section, timelines, tables and line graphs, you can easily track your business progress and present them in an attractive way.
To present a social media analytics report, you need to collect and analyze data points that help you measure your social media performance. This end of month report template will help you do that easily.
The template features a geometric block layout with various colors to bring life to the report. And the subtle use of vector graphics and unique data visualizations helps you turn your data into valuable insights.
Are you looking for a template that has a bold design with contrasting color schemes and a strong font combination? This monthly summary report template is the one you are looking for. It helps you share highlights, metrics and insights about your monthly sales.
Take advantage of the photo backgrounds, data widgets and icons to visualize your content. Find thousands of high-res stock photos in Visme's library and add them to your design. Alternatively, you can upload and add your own images.
Here's another monthly sales report template, but this time, it's specially designed for consumer goods businesses. The template will help you showcase your sales team's performance, challenges and opportunities, profit and loss (P&L) and many other metrics.
Customize it in Visme's drag-and-drop editor to replace the text, images, data sets and more.
Visme offers a wide variety of other report templates for annual reports and weekly reports. Check out the library of other report templates and customize them in the Visme editor.
RELATED: 45+ Annual Report Design Templates & Awesome Examples (2024)
Combine beautiful layouts with effective data viz in a monthly report like this template for a textile production company. Use data visualizations like the line charts on page 6 to show essential information about your company’s efforts during the last month. You can also use it to compare this and the previous year's exact month and date to provide a quick yoy growth analysis.
Visme’s data visualization options are varied. Line charts for example can be customized to look like straight lines, wavy lines or steps with or without risers. In page 6, both visualizations are line graphs but with different type settings.
Monthly reports aren’t always documents, they can also be slide decks. In this case, a presentation with bold headlines and a unique color combination that evokes a modern business mood.
Present your monthly analytics, KPIs, click through rates and cost per acquisition stats across several minimal-style slides. Complete the report with milestones, campaign updates, upcoming goals and next steps.
If you need more slides for your report, add them easily from the slide library. Choose from hundreds of slide types that you can customize easily to match the rest of the presentation.
Make your monthly reports more engaging by using an interactive template like this one. The interactive properties of this monthly reporting presentation template make it the perfect visual aid for a live presentation. Click on each section to reveal information, as you progress through the slides with your team and managers.
This template is pre-designed for reporting on a website’s monthly performance. Slide five visualizes average visit time, bounce rate and site speed using colorful data widgets. You can customize the accent colors to match your style guide, brand or chosen color theme.
Take a creative graphic approach with your monthly report document and use this shape-based template design. Use repetition to create a monthly report that’s true to your brand aesthetics and keeps the viewers’ attention.
Unify the shape colors with the graphs, charts and tables to visualize marketing strategies, sales from online marketing and overall marketing performance. Share your monthly report as a digital document and add a password entry that only your team can access.
When you need to have your monthly report ready by Friday afternoon and you’re running out of time, a template can be your greatest ally. Put all your data together into the template using the pre-designed layouts and compositions. It takes the hassle out of report writing and designing from scratch.
Are your notes and analysis too winded and complicated? Get help from the Visme AI Writer to condense and summarize your recommendations, metrics explanations and executive summary.
This template uses a clean design to help you optimize the way you share insights with your team. Keep it neat and tidy and let the data and information shine.
Impress your peers in the corporate meeting room with this clean-cut report template. Integrate a color gradient as the unifying factor across pages to frame tables and charts into attractive compositions.
Use the tables to visualize your company’s marketing metrics like financial performance, product/service performance, geographical and regional performance and customer metrics.
The tables in this report have a simple style with no column borders or row colors; it works with this template. But if you want to have a different style in your tables, the settings menu offers plenty of options for personalization.
Here’s a video that shows you how to do it:
Create an aesthetic monthly report to present your team’s performance metrics, website analytics and upcoming projects.
This monthly performance report template uses visually appealing photos to grace the pages. You can search Visme’s vast photo library for others you’d like to use and edit them using the AI Edit Tools . Some things you can achieve include removing unwanted objects or backgrounds and upscaling or deblurring any uploaded image.
Share your report internally with stakeholders by sharing a live link with a password protected entry. Track who has seen your report by checking the analytics dashboard inside your Visme account.
Present your company’s attendance rates for the month with this colorful report template. Highlight an attendance overview and leave vs attendance with a pie chart and donut chart respectively.
Use 3D graphics to visualize the information and make the report more amenable. Create a highlights page with data widgets, avatars, a small bar graph and an array; all color coded according to your brand guidelines.
For a report that showcases data from different teams, take advantage of the Visme workflows features and assign department heads to their part of the report. Ask them to fill in the data for their team right into the report, eliminating any back and forth.
Presenting an effective KPI report relies on the right combination of charts, tables and visualizations. To kick things off, list the KPIs in an overview at the start of the report to give an idea of what’s inside.
Use the list of KPIs as a navigable table of contents so when you share the report as a digital document, the viewer can jump directly to the KPI they wish to see. Use animated icons to visualize textual data and create custom bullet lists.
Color code all the visualizations to maintain a visual unity. This document uses a calm and muted color palette that inspires information retention and doesn’t distract. But if you need to change them, use the color theme picker or the colors in your brand kit.
Keep things simple but engaging, using a template that shares just enough to give an overview of your monthly operations. Add more visualization pages by duplicating a slide and customizing it to fit your needs.
This monthly report sample has full color backgrounds to highlight the information on its pages.The serif font offers a sense of elegance and order and paired with a clean sans font balances out effectively.
Present your sales performance in style with this visualization rich report. Use a combination of half donut charts, data widgets, funnel charts, bar charts, pie charts and tables to highlight sales metrics like the best performing sales funnel, monthly sales growth, sales volume by country, sales volume by age, competitor pricing and sales by contact method & channel.
In the suggestions page, use the laptop mockup to showcase a video with your suggested next steps. To add a video inside the mockup, simply drag it in from your uploads (media library). Share your report as a digital document via a live link so that your viewers can watch the video without issues.
Share invaluable information with stakeholders using a clean and attractive design that inspires conversation and gives clarity.
Unify the colors across the pages by using images that have the same colors as the design elements, accents and backgrounds. This template achieves that with whites, grays and blues; an ideal combination for a health brand.
Share the document with stakeholders as a printable or digital PDF, a digital file or a flipbook document. Add a password protected entry to ensure that only relevant stakeholders have access.
Your monthly sales report doesn’t have to be a boring document. With a template like this one you can create an attractive and engaging document that will wow your team. Use the photo editing settings to turn all images black and white. Add a red accent to create a beautiful contrast throughout the pages.
Use circular photo frames to highlight your team members and highlight their performance throughout the month. Share customer metrics like customer acquisition rate, customer lifetime value, churn rate and customer satisfaction score with a grayscale table.
One monthly report template can be reused throughout the year thanks to Visme’s dynamic fields. Use pre-set fields for dates and names and create custom fields for values and changing data.
In this template, the key KPIs are visualized with a list of icons and bold lettering, financial performance with a table and product sales with a bar chart.
To change the table data you can import a sheet from Google Docs or upload a CSV sheet from Excel. If sharing the report as a digital link you can add live data that updates on its own when the original data is manipulated.
The data visualization options in Visme are vast. One of the best examples is the map maker. You can use it to visualize geographical data in a number of ways. In this monthly work report template, the map visualizes the locations in which the project has bases.
Other map options include showcasing where there are more events, sales, fundraisers etc. You can choose to use a map that shows the entire world, continents, regions, countries or departments. Inputting the data is easy, the map maker has a settings panel where you can add it in.
Now, let's discuss what’s the purpose of a monthly report and why you should create a monthly report and not just stick to a weekly or annual report.
The best part of creating a monthly report is that it helps you stay organized, focused and on top of business activities. Your business will grow in different ways every month. You may have more clients than last month or fewer clients than last month. That's okay!
But if you want to make sure that everyone knows about all new opportunities as soon as possible so they can act on them immediately and get the most out of their time with your business, then having a monthly report for each client would be helpful!
At the end of the day, you want your team to make good decisions. If you don't track your progress and learn from your data, it's impossible for you to know if those decisions are working or not.
Creating a culture of data-driven decision-making is important because it will help improve the quality of ideas from each employee on your team. It's also an excellent way to measure their performance in their roles and what needs improvement!
A monthly report is an excellent way to track your company's performance over time. It shows you how your business is performing month after month and year after year. It can also act as a monthly checklist to help go over things that need to be done or have been accomplished.
The report will help determine if you need to adjust your marketing strategy or sales approach. This will help you understand what works best for your business to keep doing it and make it even better.
The monthly report can help identify problems before they get out of hand and ensure that your team knows how to fix them if they arise. For example:
A bug in the code could be identified as soon as users or testers find it.
A customer could bring up an issue with the documentation before they have time to complain later down the road.
You might have trouble prioritizing your tasks because you don't know what to do. A monthly report can help with this because it gives you a better sense of how much time each task will take and where the money is going.
A monthly report helps you stay focused on productivity. It ensures you don't get distracted by unimportant tasks and don't let your tasks get out of hand. This will help ensure that you have time to work on the most important things, which will make it easier for you to complete them faster.
Before creating the monthly report, you must decide what to put in it. You can get to the point by reporting on your sales or revenue growth. However, if you want to do a complete analysis of your business and make adjustments accordingly, you need to dig deeper.
So what should be included in a monthly report? Here are the elements that a well-written monthly report should include:
Your monthly report should start with a branded cover page, as it's the first thing your readers will see. It's your opportunity to showcase what the report is all about and engage your readers right away.
It should include your company logo, the date (and month/year), the report's title, and who created it. Here is an example template that includes a stunning cover page.
The table of contents will show the reader where the various sections of the report are located. It would be best if you wrote it on a separate page and it must include the headings and page numbers of each section.
What are your objectives in creating and presenting the monthly report? Include them on a separate page, right after the table of contents. This will give the readers a more detailed overview of the report, just like the template below.
Briefly explain the project status to help everyone understand what has been accomplished and is yet to be accomplished. Here you can include the tasks assigned, hours spent, project deadline and other project-related information. Even if you’re creating a project monthly report, having a project status is still needed.
If you are planning to create a project status report, use our detailed guide on writing a project status report.
Metrics and KPIs are the most critical tools for evaluating the effectiveness of your team efforts. To ensure that your monthly report offers the most insight into your performance, relate the metrics to your goals and strategies.
Planning for the next month is one of the primary goals of writing the monthly report. Provide information on what the team intends to achieve in the following month. This helps you prepare for any challenges and predict your team's workload.
Look at the ‘future considerations’ page of this monthly report template.
You can include your team members in the report to provide a clear picture of their responsibilities. An organizational chart can be the best way to show your team structure.
This customer service monthly report template is a great example. It includes a separate page that displays requests closed by the team members.
Use Visme's organizational chart maker to edit the free templates and create a professional org chart in minutes. Then add the organizational chart to your report using the Visme editor.
Now let’s discuss the critical part of this article. We will divide this section into two different sections: organizing your content and creating the report.
Before you start writing, ensure you know what you want to achieve with your monthly report. The rest of the process will depend on your goals. Here are some example goals of creating monthly reports:
If you are struggling to achieve your goals, it’s possible you’re not setting them correctly. Learn how to create SMART goals and reach them.
Use the template below or any of these 11 goal-setting worksheet templates to set achievable goals.
The data and information you gather from the previous month are the building blocks of your report. You need at least a few pieces of information to write your report, but if you can get more, even better! To gather this information:
Once you have gathered all the data you need from the various departments, it's time to analyze them. It will help you determine what led to specific outcomes and what caused errors. Then create an official statement explaining specific causes, consequences and the actions taken.
Your report should offer solutions to problems identified in the previous month. These solutions should be measurable and time-bound so that you can track their progress. For example, if your company has been experiencing slow sales growth lately, you might want to strengthen your marketing strategies to boost sales.
If you don't have any specific action items in your report, try writing down some ideas for future reports. It will help improve business operations or make them more efficient over time.
Follow these steps to create your report in an ideal monthly report format.
A good template will have all the information you need to create your monthly report, so it's easy to use and update over time. Choose a monthly report template from Visme's library and customize it to fit your needs.
Replace the texts, change the background, images, fonts, colors, icons, illustrations and other elements. You can also make your report interactive by adding a clickable menu, an interactive table of contents, hover effects or liable pop-ups and many more.
Create an eye-catching cover page to ensure your report looks as professional as possible. It will grab your readers' attention and welcome them to turn the cover and read the report tirelessly.
All the monthly report templates in Visme's library include a stunning cover page. Customize them according to your brand guidelines to make them more engaging.
Use the brand guidelines infographic template below to get inspired.
Watch the video below to learn how to create an amazing report cover page.
You might want to present some statistics and figures to show your business growth from the previous month. Visme's data visualization tools will help you turn complex data into stunning visuals.
The data visualization tools include 30+ widgets such as radial gauges, progress bars, population arrays and more.
Additionally, if you want to present larger data sets, Visme offers 20+ charts, graphs and even interactive maps.
While creating your monthly report, keep your brand identity in mind. Your monthly report should be consistent with your branding regardless of its type. Use your company logo, brand colors, brand fonts and other branding elements.
Visme's brand design tool will allow you to save your branding elements and automatically add them to your report. Learn how to create a branding kit for your business in Visme.
Here is a detailed video to help you do that.
Creating the monthly report requires input from various stakeholders across the organization. You will need to collect data, feedback and other information to write the report. So, include your key stakeholders in the process.
With Visme's collaboration features, you and your team can work together on the same project in real-time. Ask your team to collaborate by sending email invitations or via a link. They can leave comments or make changes to the document and the changes will appear live.
Watch the video below to learn more about Visme's collaboration features.
Once you are done editing your monthly report, it's time to download or share it.
In Visme, you can download your report in various formats, such as JPG, PNG, PDF, HTML5 and more. Alternatively, you can share your report online using a link or embed it anywhere on a web page using a snippet of code.
A monthly report can help you keep track of your business's health and make changes that will strengthen it further. But, creating a monthly report shouldn't be difficult and time-consuming. Use this article, along with monthly report best practices, as a guide to create monthly reports quickly and easily.
Choose a monthly report template from the list above and customize them using Visme. Sign-up for Visme's online report maker today to get started!
