Preparing Client Reports
For project managers, client meetings are an opportunity to communicate and present valuable information that is crucial to finishing any project. That being said, you can’t just go into these situations empty-handed, which is why preparing a report for these meetings is key to keeping your clients up to date on how a certain project is going.
Put simply, a client report summarises the most important information about any given project.
While the specific type of content that goes into a report will vary depending on what it’s about, client reports generally contain the following details:
- The project overview or a summary of key information.
- Milestones or the progress your company has made in fulfilling the project’s goals.
- KPIs or key performance indicators or the measurable values that evaluate and quantify the success of your client’s project.
- The budget or a breakdown of what and how you’ve spent the resources available to the project.
- Metrics or the numbers that prove you’ve achieved specific results, usually used to support your KPIs.
- Recommendations or the next steps you’ll take to move forward, usually included at the end of the report.
While it may sound straightforward, the importance of a properly created report cannot be understated. When you maximise the use of accurate and properly formatted reports for clients, your business benefits from improved communication, better client education, potential problem identification, and accountability on both sides.
If you feel like you need to step up your game when it comes to this specific task, here are several tips you can try when preparing your reports for client meetings:
Establish Reporting Standards with Your Client
Make sure you and your client are on the same page about what to expect with each report. You also need to agree on the frequency at which you’ll be sending them. Will your client be receiving one every week or every month? Will you only be sending reports right before client meetings, or will you also be sending reports that don’t require a real-time discussion? Align with your client regarding how they want to receive future updates and the kind of information they’ll be expecting each time.
Craft a Concise, Informative Summary
High-level managers and executives don’t have the time to go through each page and will likely only read what they see first. So, make sure to add a well-written summary or an overview of the project’s status at the very top of the client report.
Be sure to include only the most crucial information they need to know about the project, such as its progress, achievements, and next steps for completion. You can also highlight some key metrics that help substantiate the summarised information.
Review Every Client Report for Accuracy
Every report is a reflection of your business’s knowledge, expertise, and capabilities. Thus, if your report is poorly written or formatted, that can give clients a bad impression regarding the quality of your services and your professionalism.
Given this, take the time to review the entire document for typos, grammatical errors, data discrepancies, and other information that may inaccurately represent the project. You can even have a second pair of eyes review the report, as they may catch mistakes that you may miss.
If your report is a digital document, you can try printing and reviewing a hard copy of it. Switching from looking at it on a screen to reading it on an actual piece of paper can help you see your report from a fresh new perspective. Lastly, don’t forget to do a last overview and compare the edited report with the original to make sure you didn’t accidentally change anything else while revising the file.
Make All the Data Accessible via a Single Platform
For easy reference, you may want to try uploading all the client report’s relevant data and other key information to one central platform, preferably on the cloud. Having a quick link to a shared folder or document ensures that all meeting presenters can refer to the data at a glance in case any questions come up.
Be sure to review and read all the uploaded information before the meeting. Take your own notes if that makes sifting through information faster and easier. Doing all this preparation ensures you know where to look in case the client asks for specific key metrics, details, or numbers without wasting a lot of time searching for them.
Have All Meeting Presenters Contribute to and Review the Client Report
Everyone presenting and attending the meeting should be involved in creating the client report. So, in addition to uploading the client report data to the cloud, consider uploading the report draft as a single document that everyone can edit, revise, and rewrite accordingly.
Be clear about the deadlines and deliverables for each contributor. If everyone involved is reporting remotely, it’s a good idea to maintain timely communication and ask for updates via Microsoft Teams. For more information on this platform, check out our courses that teach you how to effectively use Microsoft Teams.
Create a Template for Quick and Easy Client Report Creation
If you’re working with multiple clients in similar fields, a template saves your team time when completing each report. For example, teams that need to make reports for social media or advertising purposes can craft templates that include information specific to their industry and data.
If the client needs a report on a social media project, for instance, the template can include fields for metrics that you can easily and quickly fill in, such as the number of followers, the amount of user engagement, and other data. If you’re doing an advertising campaign, you can include a field for the number of conversions you’ve made or the spend per ad. If you were to do a sales report, then you can include a field for the sales and profits made from customer purchases, and so on.
Taking the time to prepare client meeting reports can bring multiple benefits to your business and staff. For one, your project team members will get a better idea of their own progress and keep them on track when it comes to hitting certain milestones. Your company can also glean useful insights from the report data and results, as they can see what is working and what isn’t.
Apply these tips today, and your team will be crafting quality reports that will not only impress clients, but also potentially increase the chances that they’ll do another project with you.
Are you a struggling creating reports for your client meetings? Take a look at our online courses for project managers today.