What are project reports?
Project reports are comprehensive documents or dashboards that give information about the different aspects of a project from the beginning to the very end. These reports are extremely crucial and serve multiple purposes. For instance, they provide updates to all the involved stakeholders, guide project teams as they make decisions, and more importantly, document the progress for future reference.
Most project management software comes with detailed report modules, as analytics is vital to the whole project management process. For instance, in Zoho Projects, you get multiple types of reports, including planned vs. actual reports, workload reports, and those that visualize what happens on a project at the milestone and task levels.
Why do you need online project reports?
Online charts and reports often use graphs, images, and charts to visually present useful information such as project status, length of activity, and time spent doing each task. These reports are easy to interpret, making them an ideal way of communicating the latest updates to all your project stakeholders.
Benefits of project management reports
- Allows you to identify the resources needed to complete a project
- Project reporting software helps you monitor whether the project is on schedule or not
- Offers insights into how your team is progressing against pre-defined goals
- Quickly and easily generates useful reports using your business data, with no IT help
Importance of project reporting software
- One primary advantage of project reporting software is the automation of data collection and consolidation, which drastically reduces time spent on manual data entry. This automation ensures that project reports are consistently based on the most accurate and current data, giving very little room for errors and inconsistencies. Apart from this, standardized templates and reporting tools within the software make it even easier to create professional, consistent reports across different projects.
- Another significant advantage is the collaborative capabilities on offer. Team members—even those across the globe working on different timelines—have a centralized platform to look at all the reports in real time, which enhances their teamwork and communication. As an added benefit, an organization can even enforce role-based viewing and editing capabilities for an additional layer of security.
- Decision-making becomes a lot easier at the managerial level, as you can visualize relevant and pertinent data through the use of data visualization tools. These tools give you a clear idea of how an organization is performing on various projects in their portfolio.
- There are a lot of other benefits as well, like the flexibility to scale the number of projects that an organization can complete, the ability to analyze historical trends, and the means to simplify compliance and accountability.
In short, any organization will benefit immensely from using project reporting software.
Choose Zoho Projects as your online project report software!
Zoho Projects comes with a set of project reporting tools to give you actionable insights into your projects. You can assess how long a project will take to complete, find out who is free and who is occupied, and prioritize the order in which the tasks are to be carried out. With this, you can work out the most efficient way to complete a project.
Interested in using software for project reports? Here's a list of the various reports that are available in our project management reporting tool.
Project status reports
Zoho Projects has an extensive, fully featured dashboard that depicts your project's progress, budget health, team performance, overdue tasks, timesheet summary, and more.
Timeline report
Plan efficiently using our Gantt chart, and track how your project is progressing in real time. Easily set dependencies between your tasks with a simple drag-and-drop interface in the Gantt module to keep up with the critical path of your project.
Variance reports
Set a standard for your cost and schedule to compare with your actual performance. In Zoho Projects, this can be done with baselines, planned vs. actual hours for time, and planned vs. actual cost for budget.
Resource availability report
Track your team's workload using the workload report. Reallocate work items within your team based on how overworked or underworked an employee is. Resource allocation can also be done by knowing the team's availability during planning.
Time tracking report
Visualize and analyze your time log entries using the timesheet reports and easily calculate the amount to invoice your clients.
Task and Issue reports
Create basic and advanced reports for your tasks and issues by comparing various aspects of these modules. Custom reports can also be created for both tasks and issues using our online project report maker.
Zoho Analytics Integration
With our Zoho Analytics integration, you can create and customize more than 50 reports to give you deep insights into your projects. You can also integrate with Zoho Expense now to create expense reports for your projects.
