Why monthly reports rarely lead to decisions and what a useful one contains

You probably know the scene. The report lands around the 8th: twenty slides, tidy charts, green and red arrows. Everyone skims it, someone says “interesting”, and the week moves on. Next month, same again.

A lot of work goes into it, and most reports describe what happened accurately enough. They fall short elsewhere, for four fairly predictable reasons.

Four reasons nothing comes of it

• It describes without concluding.A typical report answers “what happened?” A decision needs two more answers: why, and what to do. A falling line doesn’t tell you whether the cause is price, season, the form or a poorly targeted campaign.
• It arrives too late.A March report delivered in mid-April covers a campaign that’s over and a budget that’s spent. You can note what happened, but you can’t correct it.
• It shows everything, so nothing stands out.When every channel gets a page and every metric a chart, the reader has to do the sorting. Metrics tend to get added and seldom removed, because nobody wants to be the one who made a number disappear.
• Nobody owns it.The report goes to everyone and asks nothing of anyone. Without a name next to an action, it informs and stops there.

What a useful report contains

A good report fits on one page, two at most. It holds five things, in this order.

1. A three-sentence summary.What changed, what you think caused it, what you propose. Someone who stops reading there should still know what to do.
2. The few numbers that matter, with a comparison.Five or six, always the same ones, defined the same way each month. A number alone says nothing, so show the previous month and, if your business is seasonal, the same period last year.
3. The two or three changes worth stopping on.Don’t comment on everything. Pick what moved enough to change something, up or down.
4. The explanation, with how sure you are.Separate what the data shows from what you infer. “Sales from paid search fell” is a finding. “Probably because bids went up” is a hypothesis, and calling it one means you can test it.
5. The decisions needed.A short list: the action, the owner, the date, and the number that will show whether it worked. If there’s nothing to decide this month, say so. That’s information too.

Then open the next report by going back over the last one’s decisions: what was done, and how it turned out. Your reports become a running record from month to month, and you can finally see whether your decisions paid off.

Changing the format without starting over

Next month, keep your current report as an appendix and add one page in front with the five items above. Ask that the meeting cover that page only. After two or three months, check which appendix pages actually got used, and drop the rest. Nobody has to defend the loss of a chart, since usage has already decided.

Look too at what really has to wait for month-end. A monthly rhythm suits budget and direction decisions well. Ad spend that’s running away or a broken form should set off an alert, or surface in a quick weekly look. Putting everything in one document is how it gets so heavy.

Where Oryon can help

Oryon handles the mechanical part: reports are generated from your connected sources, for the period and template you choose, and download as PDF or, on the Team plan, PowerPoint. The text is based on your numbers, but it remains a draft to review.

You still have to say what you’ve decided, who’s doing it and by when. No tool can do that for you, and it’s the part that makes a report useful.