What is an annual report?
An annual report is a comprehensive document that consolidates data from multiple sources (e.g., financial systems, HR databases, project management tools) to track and display key performance indicators (KPIs) (e.g., annual revenue, employee turnover, project completion rates), enabling organizations to monitor yearly performance and create presentations for stakeholders and executives.
Annual 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 an annual report?
An actionable annual report balances context and specificity based on the audience (executives, managers, and analysts) and their use cases.
Executive annual reports
Executive reports for CEOs, CFOs, and board members show the organization's bottom-line impact. Reviewed annually, they include:
- Financial performance analysis: revenue, profit margins, and cost analysis.
- Strategic goal tracking: progress towards annual objectives and key results (OKRs).
- Employee performance analysis: turnover rates, satisfaction scores, and productivity metrics.
- Add text for additional context to translate metrics for non-technical audiences. Present in slide decks and simplified Looker Studio reports.
Manager annual reports
Manager reports provide a comprehensive view of departmental performance, helping align teams and define strategies. They include:
- Departmental performance reporting: overall performance by department or team.
- Goal tracking: compare current performance vs annual objectives.
- Resource allocation for prioritization and efficiency improvements.
- Risk analysis for identifying potential challenges and opportunities.
Operational Annual Reports
Operational reports for analysts and department managers have granular, customizable KPIs to solve technical issues. Monitored monthly or quarterly, they cover:
- Project management: timelines, milestones, and resource utilization.
- HR metrics: hiring rates, training completion, and employee engagement.
- Financial metrics: budget adherence, cost savings, and investment returns.
Operational annual 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 an annual report?
To build an annual 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 financial systems for revenue and cost data, HR databases for employee metrics, and project management tools for project data.
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 annual report templates in Google Sheets or Looker Studio, designed for use cases like financial analysis, HR metrics, and project management.
Learn to copy Looker Studio templates.
While templates are the starting point. Make them specific for your organization. Map your specific metrics, especially custom financial metrics, HR data, project milestones, and all the fields and metrics that you define as "key performance indicators" and "strategic goals".
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 annual reporting use cases, such as financial analysis, HR metrics, and project management.
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. Revenue, expenses, employee count, project status, etc.).
- Choose breakdowns to segment your data (e.g. by department, project, employee, etc.)
You can follow these tutorials on adding data to your reports
Design
To make your annual reports truly white-label you can add logos, colors, fonts, and styling to mirror your brand.
Follow these tutorials to design your annual reports:
Share
Share your annual reports via links, PDF, schedule emails, and control permissions.
KPIs to include in an annual report?
Annual reports should include a mix of financial, operational, and strategic metrics and KPIs to fully understand the performance of the organization towards its annual goals. They include:
Financial KPIs measure the financial health and performance of the organization:
- Revenue metrics: total revenue, revenue growth, revenue per department
- Cost metrics: total expenses, cost savings, cost per department
- Profitability metrics: net profit, profit margin, EBITDA
Operational KPIs measure the efficiency and effectiveness of organizational processes:
- Project management: project completion rate, on-time delivery, resource utilization
- HR metrics: employee turnover, satisfaction scores, training completion
- Productivity metrics: output per employee, efficiency ratios
Strategic KPIs measure progress towards long-term goals and objectives:
- Goal achievement: percentage of strategic goals met
- Innovation: number of new products/services launched
- Market position: market share, competitive analysis
To analyze these annual KPIs, segment them by:
- Department: finance, HR, operations, sales
- Time: monthly, quarterly, annually
- Project: status, priority
- Region: domestic, international
- Employee: role, tenure, performance
- Product/Service: category, lifecycle stage
