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Business reports are invaluable. A well-crafted business report can help your company stand out from the competition and showcase your expertise in your industry. According to a recent survey, 88% of businesses agree that reports help them make decisions and evaluate performance.
Creating a business report is a crucial yet one of the most challenging tasks you may come across in your day-to-day responsibilities. However, you cannot risk compromising any part of such an essential document, from including every aspect of the business performance to getting the aesthetics right.
Not sure how to get started? We've developed this guide to help you create a business report that accurately reflects the goals, achievements and challenges.
We’ll discuss the critical components of an expert business report and provide some useful templates to get you started.
But before that, make sure you watch the video below on how to create an effective business report.
A business report is a written document that presents information about a company's performance, goals and challenges. They typically include data and analysis that support the report's purpose. These data may consist of graphs, charts and other visual aids to help convey complex information.
You can use these reports for various purposes, such as updating shareholders on the company's financial standing, presenting project progress to clients or providing marketing insights to the company's team.
Furthermore, you can create reports for various timeframes, such as daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or annually.
When creating a business report, you must consider the target audience and the report's purpose. The language and tone of the report may vary depending on whether you are using it for internal purposes, for stakeholders or shareholders or clients.
The responsibility for providing a business report typically falls on senior management, such as the CEO, CFO or COO. These individuals oversee the company's operations and ensure it meets its goals and objectives.
However, other management team members may also create and present business reports. For example, the marketing manager may be responsible for creating a report on the company's marketing efforts. In contrast, the project manager may be responsible for creating a report on the progress of a specific project like this one.
In addition to management, other stakeholders may also be involved in creating and presenting business reports. For example, external auditors may be responsible for providing an audit report, while investors may request specific reports related to the company's financial performance.
Regardless of who is responsible for providing a business report, ensuring that the report accurately reflects the company's performance and goals is essential. This requires careful planning, data collection, analysis and clear and concise communication of the report's findings.
You may need to deal with various reports to run your business efficiently. The business report you need to create depends solely on your company's needs and purposes.
Therefore, you need to learn about various business reports before creating one.
For example, an annual report might be best for you to showcase how your company has performed over the past year. If you need to report specifically on a project or initiative, you need to create a project report.
Here are the types of business reports that you need to create. We have also included templates for each type to help you learn better and use them to create one for yourself.
Annual reports are a powerful way to showcase what your company has achieved over the past year. They provide an overview of performance, including financials, and highlight your strategic direction moving forward.
They’re also a chance to share how you're working to improve your position in the market.
An annual report is more than just data, it’s a chance to tell your company’s story. Design it to capture attention and keep your audience engaged. By choosing to make your annual report interactive, you can boost content views, improve information retention, and strengthen brand perception.
Monthly reports are a great way to keep your company's management informed about what's happening in the organization. They provide an overview of how each department is performing and how its goals are being met.
A good monthly report should include an overview of the previous month’s activities, a detailed analysis of how your team performed against its goals, a breakdown of key metrics and performance indicators and any issues or concerns that need to be addressed.
Similar to the monthly and annual reports, the weekly report provides an overview of what's happening in the company more frequently. It helps you present information about what projects the teams are working on and how they are progressing, as well as any new developments that have taken place in the last week.
Weekly reports generally contain the same information as their monthly and annual counterparts but may also include more detailed information about specific ongoing projects.
For example, if a team has a task that requires three weeks to be completed, you may want to include an update on what they’ve accomplished so far and any challenges they have faced along the way.
Financial reports are usually the first thing a company will generate after the end of a fiscal year. It shouldn't be confused with an expense report. They provide a snapshot of the company's financial status at a given time. You can use them to show how much money the company made and spent, as well as any profits or losses that occurred over a while.
This may include information about how much revenue was generated by specific products or services and the organization's listings of assets and liabilities.
To create an engaging and comprehensive financial report, you may need to deal with a lot of financial data and then put it into a concise format. Visme comes with a wide range of data visualization tools such as progress bars, radial gauges, charts and graphs and many more. You can use them to present your data in a way that makes sense.
Watch the video below to learn more about utilizing data visualization to level up your reports.
If you are a project manager, a team lead or any other professional who oversees a project in the organization, you should keep a project report template in your toolkit.
They are critical to project management because they allow you to analyze and evaluate your team's performance. You can use them to identify areas for improvement and monitor progress toward achieving goals.
Use Visme's project report templates to create and manage reports that help the stakeholders keep a bird's eye view of the project.
Social media reports provide an overview of how your company's social media campaigns performed. You may include information about how many followers you gained on each platform and what types of posts were most popular with users.
In addition to providing general statistics, you can also include data that shows the impact of specific types of content or advertising. Here is a detailed guide to help you learn how to create visual statistics using data widgets in Visme.
You can create a social media report for each channel separately or for all combined. Visme has a template for all your varied needs.
Summarize your company's sales performance over a period of time using these sales report templates. You can include information about how many units were sold and what products were most popular and provide a revenue breakdown by region or customer type.
If you have multiple sales channels, show how they performed relative to each other.
Presenting sales data visually can help you identify trends and opportunities. Use these sales report templates to create graphs, tables and charts based on data from your accounting system or another source of information.
The beautiful thing about Visme is that you can import sales data from Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel into your report.
Use these marketing report templates to present information about your company's marketing efforts, such as the number of customers who responded to a campaign or the amount of revenue generated by various types of advertising.
Include information on the costs of each marketing activity and how they contributed to your overall revenue. You should include a breakdown by channel or type of campaign and show how each one performed compared with previous efforts.
Here is a comprehensive guide that can teach you how to create a marketing report more effectively.
Nonprofit organizations must also create and present reports regularly to their boards of directors, donors and other stakeholders. These templates can help you create a professional-looking report that provides the information your audience needs.
Include details on how much money was raised, how it was spent and what impact it had on your organization's mission. You may also include statistics about the number of people served or helped by your efforts as well as any challenges faced during the year.
Share the word about your nonprofit's impact on the community and the world. These templates can help you create a professional-looking report that provides the information your audience needs.
Also, don't forget to check out our complete guide on creating a quarterly report. It comes with a step-by-step process and free templates so you can make your own.
Creating a business report is a multi-step process that requires careful consideration of all aspects, from readability to format and design. Therefore, the best way to create a report is using a template. So, we will use a business report template from Visme and customize it.
Follow the five easy steps below, and don’t skip any part to create a concise report.
Start by conducting thorough research and gathering relevant data. This data could include statistics, financial figures, customer feedback or other information pertinent to your report's purpose. Ensure that your data is accurate and reliable, as this will be the foundation of your report.
For example, if you want to create a social media report, you will need to collect data that reflects the current state of your social media presence. This can include metrics such as your followers on each platform, how many interactions they generate, and any other relevant data points.
The more data you can collect and the more accurate it is, the more comprehensive your report will be.
Here is an infographic that captures the 15 most important social media KPIs to track and include in the report.
Once you have gathered your data, it's time to organize it into a cohesive and logical structure. This could involve categorizing information into sections or breaking it into charts and graphs. Consider the report's purpose and audience and arrange the data accordingly.
For example, if you create a financial report, include charts showing your company's revenue and expenses and graphs that compare those numbers over time. Use Visme's chart and graph templates to visualize your data, making it easier to understand. This can include using line charts, bar and pie charts to display your data's trends over time.
Below is a video showing you how to customize data in Visme. This is especially useful if you are editing the pre-existing data visualizations in the templates.
With the data organized, you can choose a suitable template from Visme’s library. We’ve already discussed the types of reports that you can read to select the template.
Once you have selected the template, it’s time to customize it. Here are some tips to help you do it:
Creating an eye-catching cover page is essential to make a great first impression on your audience. The cover page should be visually appealing and grab the reader's attention while also conveying the report's purpose.
Use high-quality images, bold typography and a color scheme that complements your brand and sets the overall tone for your report. You can use the professional-looking cover pages of Visme’s templates or customize them according to your brand guidelines.
Read this article to learn how to create a stunning cover page for your business report or watch this video to learn more.
The design elements will help you further enhance your report's visual appeal. Visme offers a variety of customizable design elements that you can easily drag and drop onto your report template.
Here are some tips for you:
Here is an infographic that shows the types of data widgets to create in Visme.
At this stage, you should include all the content you want to present in the report. You can take advantage of the preexisting content of the templates or add your own text and all the other information.
Now it’s time to take your business report to the next level by adding some mind-blowing interactive effects. According to a recent study, 60% of organizations that report choosing to create interactive content rather than static content performed better than the 25% who don’t.
With Visme, you can make your business report or any other documents interactive in a few clicks.
Here are the interactive features that can make your report enjoyable to read:
Add animations to your reports, making them more dynamic and engaging. You can animate individual elements, such as text, images and icons, to create an attention-grabbing effect.
Customize the colors, labels, and other features of your charts and graphs, and you can also add interactive elements such as hover effects and clickable data points.
Add clickable links, buttons, and menus to your report, allowing your audience to navigate through your content and access related information.
Connect your visual content to live data sources, such as spreadsheets or databases. Create dynamic charts and graphs that update automatically when the data changes, ensuring that your visual content is always accurate and relevant.
According to a recent survey, consistency in brand presentation leads to a 23% increase in revenue. To maintain a consistent brand identity across all your business collaterals, you should include branding elements such as brand colors, brand fonts, logos and others in your reports.
While it may seem daunting, with Visme’s brand design tool, applying your branding elements to your design is just a piece of cake.
Watch this video below to learn to set up your branding kit in Visme.
Once you have customized the template by following the steps above, you can share it with your team members to get their feedback. Creating a crucial document like a business report may require input from different team members across the organization.
With Visme’s collaboration features, you and your team can work on the same project simultaneously. Invite them via email or a link to make changes, add or resolve comments, pin annotations and suggest improvements.
The collaborative design feature is a real game changer when it comes to multiple team members needing to work on the same project. Here is what Jaime Kelm, the Director of Business and Data Strategy at LAFC, has to say about this feature:
“The sharing and communal ability of the users and the ability for our reps to use what someone else has made and tweak it to fit their needs has been a huge time saver.”
You can read the full case study to learn how the team was able to create visual content 60% faster with Visme.
Once you are satisfied with the design and content of the report, download it in your desired format and share it with your intended audience. Visme allows you to download your report as a PDF, PNG, or HTML file, which you can easily share via email or social media.
If you want to publish your report on a public platform, Visme allows you to do that too. You can also generate an embed code to publish the report on your website, blog or anywhere on the web. Or, publish your report on social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter directly from the Visme app.
Creating a business report is a great way to showcase your company's progress and accomplishments while keeping stakeholders informed. All the facts, figures and analytical information you'll present in business reports will help you and your team make the necessary adjustments to run and grow your business.
So, whether you're creating an annual report for shareholders, a project report for clients or a marketing report for your team, Visme has got you covered. Use this article as a guide and edit the templates to create the perfect report for all your company's needs.
However, to run your business successfully, you must create many documents and visual content, such as pitch decks, infographics, sales playbooks, social media graphics and others. Visme can help you create all these business collaterals without spending hours editing, formatting and designing.
Sign-up for Visme and start creating your business reports and other documents in just a few clicks.
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