What is a weekly report?
A weekly report is a document that consolidates data from multiple sources (e.g., project management tools, CRM systems, financial software) to track and display key performance indicators (KPIs) (e.g., task completion rate, sales growth, budget variance), enabling teams and organizations to monitor weekly performance and create presentations for stakeholders and executives.
Weekly reports are typically created using flexible tools like Google Looker Studio, Power BI, Google Sheets, or platform-specific solutions to enable high customization and integration of multiple data sources.
What to include in a weekly report?
An actionable weekly report balances context and specificity based on the audience (executives, managers, and analysts) and their use cases.
Executive weekly reports
Executive reports for CEOs, CFOs, and stakeholders show the organization's bottom-line impact. Reviewed weekly, they include:
- Financial performance analysis: revenue, expenses, and profit margins.
- Operational efficiency analysis: productivity metrics, resource utilization.
- Customer satisfaction analysis: feedback scores, retention rates.
- Add text for additional context to translate metrics for non-technical audiences. Present in slide decks and simplified Looker Studio reports.
Manager weekly reports
Manager reports have cross-departmental views with drill-downs to see performance by team, project, region, and objective. They help align teams, define tactics, and include:
- Project tracking: overall progress, milestones, and deadlines.
- Goal tracking: compare current performance vs objectives.
- Audits for prioritization and spotting issues
- Resource allocation for optimizing team efforts.
- Employee performance and engagement metrics.
Operational Weekly Reports
Operational reports for analysts and team leads have granular, customizable KPIs to solve technical issues. Monitored hourly, daily, or weekly, they cover:
- Task management: completion rates, overdue tasks, bottlenecks.
- Sales: lead conversion rates, sales pipeline status.
- Customer support: ticket resolution times, satisfaction scores.
- Inventory: stock levels, turnover rates, order fulfillment.
Operational weekly reports are highly customized, built in flexible tools like Google Sheets or Looker Studio to enable data cleaning, blending, annotations, and integrating multiple sources.
How to build a weekly report?
To build a weekly report, connect your data sources, choose a template on Looker Studio or Sheets, build your queries by selecting metrics and dimensions, choose charts to visualize your data, customize the report, design and share via link, PDF or email.
Here’s the breakdown:
Connect data sources
Define and connect the data sources to bring to your report. Common sources are project management tools for task tracking, CRM systems for sales data, financial software for budget tracking, and customer feedback platforms for satisfaction scores.
To connect your data sources, go to portermetrics.com, choose the data sources to bring to your report.
You can follow these tutorials on connecting your data:
Choose a template
Choose from dozens of weekly report templates in Google Sheets or Looker Studio, designed for use cases like project tracking, sales monitoring, budget analysis, and team performance.
Learn to copy Looker Studio templates.
While templates are the starting point. Make them specific for your business or organization. Map your specific metrics, especially custom KPIs, CRM contact data, project milestones, and all the fields and metrics that you define as "key performance indicators" and "objectives".
Depending on your reporting tool—Google Sheets or Google Looker Studio, pick any of the dozens of templates created by our team and customers to solve your weekly reporting use cases, such as project tracking, sales monitoring, budget analysis, and team performance.
Select metrics, dimensions, and charts
Once your report template is downloaded, you may 1)modify it or 2) create a blank page to build it from scratch. Whatever the case, setting up a query always follows these steps:
- Select the data source and the account connected to it
- Choose metrics (e.g., Task completion rate, sales growth, budget variance, etc.).
- Choose breakdowns to segment your data (e.g., by date, project name, team member, etc.)
You can follow these tutorials on adding data to your reports
Design
To make your weekly reports truly white-label you can add logos, colors, fonts, and styling to mirror your brand.
Follow these tutorials to design your weekly reports:
Share
Share your weekly reports via links, PDF, schedule emails, and control permissions.
KPIs to include in a weekly report?
Weekly reports should include a mix of operational, financial, customer, and team performance metrics and KPIs to fully understand the performance of the organization towards business goals. They include:
Operational KPIs measure the efficiency and effectiveness of processes:
- Task metrics: completion rate, overdue tasks, bottlenecks
- Sales metrics: lead conversion rates, sales growth, pipeline status
- Customer metrics: satisfaction scores, retention rates, feedback
Financial KPIs compare your financial outputs to the cost, including:
- Revenue: total sales, growth rate
- Expenses: budget variance, cost control
- Profitability: profit margins, ROI
Team performance KPIs compare the input with the output from one stage to another
- Productivity: tasks completed per team member
- Engagement: employee satisfaction, turnover rates
- Collaboration: cross-departmental projects, communication effectiveness
To analyze these weekly KPIs, segment them by:
- Department: sales, marketing, operations, finance
- Time: Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly
- Project: milestones, objectives
- Team: members, roles, responsibilities
- Customer: feedback, demographics, behavior
