What is a monthly report?
A monthly report is a document that consolidates data from multiple sources (e.g., financial systems, CRM, project management tools) to track and display key performance indicators (KPIs) (e.g., revenue, expenses, project progress), enabling teams and executives to monitor monthly performance and create presentations for stakeholders.
Monthly 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 monthly report?
An actionable monthly report balances context and specificity based on the audience (executives, managers, and analysts) and their use cases.
Executive monthly reports
Executive reports for CFOs, CEOs, and board members show the organization's bottom-line impact. Reviewed monthly or quarterly, they include:
- Financial analysis: revenue, expenses, profit margins, and cash flow.
- Operational metrics: project completion rates, resource utilization, and efficiency.
- Customer analysis: retention, satisfaction, and lifetime value by customer segment.
- Add text for additional context to translate metrics for non-technical audiences. Present in slide decks and simplified Looker Studio reports.
Manager monthly reports
Manager reports have cross-departmental views with drill-downs to see performance by team, project, region, and time period. They help align teams, define tactics, and include:
- Cross-departmental reporting: overall performance, project status, and resource allocation.
- Goal tracking: compare current performance vs objectives.
- Audits for prioritization and spotting issues
- Competitive analysis for benchmarking and strategy development.
- Market, product, and customer research
Operational Monthly Reports
Operational reports for analysts and department managers have granular, customizable KPIs to solve technical issues. Monitored daily, weekly, or monthly, they cover:
- Financial: budget tracking, expense management, and variance analysis.
- Project: task completion, milestone tracking, and resource allocation.
- Customer: feedback, support tickets, and satisfaction scores.
- HR: employee performance, attendance, and turnover rates.
Operational monthly 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 monthly report?
To build a monthly 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 budget and expense tracking, CRM for customer data, project management tools for project status, and HR systems for employee 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 monthly report templates in Google Sheets or Looker Studio, designed for use cases like financial tracking, project management, and customer analysis.
Learn to copy Looker Studio templates.
While templates are the starting point. Make them specific for your business or agency. Map your specific metrics, especially custom financial metrics, CRM contact data, project milestones, and all the fields and metrics that you define as "key performance indicators" and "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 monthly reporting use cases, such as financial tracking, project management, and customer analysis.
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, project progress, customer satisfaction, etc.).
- Choose breakdowns to segment your data (e.g. by date, department, project, etc.)
You can follow these tutorials on adding data to your reports
Design
To make your monthly reports truly white-label you can add logos, colors, fonts, and styling to mirror your brand.
Follow these tutorials to design your monthly reports:
Share
Share your monthly reports via links, PDF, schedule emails, and control permissions.
KPIs to include in a monthly report?
Monthly reports should include a mix of financial, operational, customer, and HR metrics and KPIs to fully understand the performance of the organization towards business goals. They include:
Financial KPIs measure the financial health and performance of the organization:
- Revenue metrics: total revenue, recurring revenue, revenue growth
- Expense metrics: total expenses, cost of goods sold, operating expenses
- Profitability metrics: gross profit, net profit, profit margin
Operational KPIs track the efficiency and effectiveness of business operations:
- Project: completion rate, on-time delivery, resource utilization
- Process: cycle time, error rate, throughput
- Efficiency: cost per unit, productivity rate
Customer KPIs measure customer satisfaction and engagement:
- Satisfaction: customer satisfaction score, net promoter score
- Engagement: active users, churn rate
- Value: customer lifetime value, average order value
HR KPIs track employee performance and satisfaction:
- Performance: employee productivity, goal achievement
- Satisfaction: employee satisfaction score, turnover rate
- Development: training hours, skill acquisition
To analyze these monthly KPIs, segment them by:
- Department: finance, operations, sales, HR
- Time: daily, weekly, monthly
- Customer: segment, behavior
