Status reports assembled from the project, not written from memory

• Overall health you choose (green, amber or red), with the reason in a sentence.
• Progress against the plan and the baseline, with milestones hit, missed and coming up.
• Risks and issues from the RAID log, with owners and dates.
• Change requests raised, signed and pending, with their schedule and cost impact.
• Signatures outstanding, so the client sees what they are holding up.
• Next period: the tasks and meetings due before the next report.

A published report appears at the top of the client portal with the date, and older reports stay listed underneath. The client gets an email with the link. If a client prefers attachments, download the PDF with your branding and send it as you always have. Either way, the review meeting that follows has its agenda already written.

Hand-written reports drift. Two weeks in, the milestone list is copied from the last report rather than the plan, the risk register has not been opened, and the status is whatever colour feels defensible. An assembled report cannot drift because it reads from the same project the team is updating every day. You still write the paragraph that explains it, but the facts underneath are the facts.

On a PRINCE2 project the report follows the highlight report structure: the stage, status against tolerance, products completed this period and planned for the next, issues, risks, requests for change and lessons. The fortnightly highlight report review is a scheduled meeting with calendar invites to the Project Board, so the cadence is set up before the first stage starts.

Beyond the client-facing status report, Pro includes a library of internal reports: portfolio status across every project, task lists with saved filters and a column picker, timesheets, availability, workload and variance against baseline. Each exports to CSV. Agency adds the portfolio roadmap, a cross-project Gantt of phases and milestones.

Status reports are on every plan. The full report library, baselines and variance are on Pro at $9 a seat. See pricing, or how status reports fit the consulting workflow.