Are you exhausted from creating quarterly reports from scratch every time? A Quarterly Report is a crucial business report that needs to be created with care and precision.

In this article, we will discuss the key points to keep in mind while creating a Quarterly Report, Quarterly Report template, and how to write a Quarterly Report quickly.

What is a Quarterly Report?

A quarterly report is a type of financial statement that provides an overview of the company’s financial performance for a given period—typically three months. These reports can be used by investors, creditors, and other stakeholders to evaluate the health of the company. They are also often used internally by management to track progress against long-term goals or budget expectations.

Why is the Quarterly Report Important?

A Quarterly Report contains significant information regarding all that occurred in a business, both positive and negative, during the preceding three months. This may include updates on a project’s progress, the current financial and sales status of the business, and the overall performance of employees.

Quarterly reports are critical documents for businesses. Even small businesses require them as they guide how to proceed in the next few months. Quarterly reports are typically built on daily and monthly reports and can ultimately lead to an annual business report.

Key Points to Writing a Good Quarterly Report

If you’re a manager, chances are you’ve written countless quarterly or annual reports throughout your career. However, even as an experienced manager, it’s essential to refresh your knowledge of the basics from time to time. To help you out, here are some fundamental tips on how to write a quarterly report effectively.

1. Supervise the Entire Operation

To gather enough concrete facts for your report, you should supervise the entire operation regularly and collect the necessary data. Take notes on your employees’ performances and productivity as you roam around the work premises. Recording subordinates’ performance and data on paper is not an efficient way to collect and utilize data in the future. Most people nowadays will choose to create a reporting dashboard using a professional BI tool for recording, monitoring and displaying key data.

It’s also vital to communicate with your employees’ direct superiors to obtain more first-person views regarding the operation.

2. Collect Your Daily and Monthly Reports

Include any unresolved issues and occurrences from your previous daily and monthly reports in your quarterly report to resolve them as soon as possible. You can also highlight any resolved issues and occurrences from previous reports to add some positives to your quarterly report.

3. Focus on Significant Occurrences

It’s crucial to emphasize and prioritize significant occurrences, especially those related to finances and the quality of the business’s products and services. These three factors are crucial to keeping a business running.

4. Keep it Concise

Quarterly reports should always be concise and straight to the point. Avoid using flowery language that might obscure the information in your report. This is to avoid potential misunderstandings that could cause more problems in the business. More importantly, avoid including irrelevant information.

5. Review Everything

After injecting all the necessary information into your quarterly report, take the time to review it thoroughly, edit and proofread from start to finish before submitting it to your superiors. Check for typos and unintentional grammar errors. Most importantly, ensure that all the occurrences in your quarterly report are accurately reflected.

6. Data Visualization

Data visualization is an essential aspect of writing a quarterly report, as it provides significant benefits to the report’s clarity and impact. By using charts, graphs, tables, and other visual elements, you can present complex data in a more accessible and understandable format, allowing readers to grasp the information more easily.

Visualizing data in a quarterly report also helps to highlight key trends and patterns that might otherwise be challenging to identify. For example, you can use line charts to track the progress of a project over the past three months, or pie charts to display the distribution of sales by product or region.

Moreover, presenting data visually can also make your report more engaging and persuasive, helping to convince your superiors of the validity of your analysis and recommendations. With visually appealing and well-designed charts and graphs, you can emphasize the significance of your findings and drive home your points more effectively.

How to Write a Quarterly Report Effectively

How to achieve the points mentioned above and write a quarterly report effectively without creating quarterly reports from scratch every time?

The essence of streamlining quarterly reports lies in report automation, which relies on two key components: automatic data entry and automated reporting. While Python and Excel are commonly used tools for this purpose, the learning curve for new users can be steep.

To overcome this challenge, I would recommend code-free software with a user-friendly drag-and-drop interface——FineReport.

1. Quickly Collect the Data for Quarterly Reports

For instance, let’s say I’m a production line manager in the manufacturing industry, and my quarterly task is to compile a report based on production data. The first step is to identify the relevant indicators and metrics and prioritize them for the report.

The challenge arises when I need to extract data from various Excel files and my previous daily and monthly reports. However, this issue can be resolved with a reporting tool like FineReport, which can directly connect to the database and create a centralized data centre for all the production data.

FineReport can be integrated with other business systems like ERP or CRM, which store the production data, and automatically extract and update the relevant information in real-time on the report.

Despite the need for a comprehensive production planning system to facilitate report generation, very few companies have such a system in place. Typically, production schedules are either summarized and printed in Excel or manually recorded on a blackboard to manage production arrangements. This process of collecting data for generating daily reports is extremely challenging.

FineReport’s data entry function plays a crucial role in addressing this issue. With this feature, data can be directly inputted into the database via online forms, similar to filling out questionnaires. Once the report formats are set, the online forms can be distributed to the team, allowing for the direct collection of schedule and progress data into the database. The latest data will then be displayed on the daily reports.

Another feature supported by FineReport is the batch importing of Excel data. By designing and importing templates based on Excel sheets, data can be imported into FineReport with just a few clicks.

2. Automate the Report Generation Process with Quarterly Report Template

With the database issue resolved, it’s time to create quarterly reports. However, to automate the report generation process, I want to create a quarterly report template that can be used repeatedly.

Thankfully, FineReport makes this process easy. You can create an excellent quarterly report template and save it in FineReport. This template can be reused for future quarterly reports, significantly reducing the time and effort required to generate reports.

Additionally, FineReport’s automated reporting allows for the creation of different types of templates for various reporting users. For example, the information department can design separate templates for headquarters and branch offices, or assign unique templates to each team within the office.

By setting up a drill-down relationship between these templates, it’s possible to drill down from headquarters’ reports to the branches and offices, making it much easier to identify and address critical issues.

3. Use the Rich Data Visualization Function of FineReport

Quarterly reports typically involve the progress of various projects, and it can be challenging to present data intuitively using numbers alone.

Fortunately, FineReport is an excellent graph maker! It provides an array of tools, including dashboards, progress bars, and other charts, to help visualize the progress of your plans.

FineBI supports 19 categories and more than 50 styles of self-developed HTML5 charts, covering all basic and high-level charts on the market, and also has excellent dynamic effects and a powerful interactive experience. Various features can be set according to the needs during use, and can also be self-adjusted and displayed on the mobile terminal and large LED screen.

4. Enable the Business Department to Directly Monitor the Origin of Problematic Data by Leveraging the Quarterly Report

In contrast to the fixed presentation in conventional quarterly reports, FineReport enables diverse collaborative drill-down and linkage analyses for problem diagnosis. This feature empowers the business department to directly track the root cause of problematic data in the quarterly reports.

5. Export or Print the Quarterly Report

FineReport offers the capability to export and print reports in diverse file types including Excel, PDF, PNG, and more.

6. Share the Reports With Your Team or Your Manager

Typically, businesses generate quarterly reports on a set schedule. However, manually submitting reports each day can be tedious and time-consuming, leading to delays in reporting during unexpected events.

Thankfully, this problem can be easily resolved with the reporting software FineReport which includes a scheduling function. By automating regular reporting intervals, you can eliminate repetitive work and avoid report delays. Simply configure daily, monthly, quarterly, or other recurring schedules without any additional effort.

FineReport provides an efficient solution for managers who rely on others to submit monthly reports and gather data. By automating the process of collecting and organizing data, you can conveniently access the necessary reports on your mobile device at any time and from any location.

Furthermore, if you are responsible for creating data reports, FineReport’s regular scheduling and notification features can simplify the process by generating and sending quarterly reports to the relevant managers.

The Quarter Report Template of Different Industries

Templates provide a structure for quarter reports, making it easier to organize and present data. They also ensure consistency in the layout, design, and formatting of the report.

Here are some quarter report templates and examples of different Industries you can try in FineReport.

Supply Chain Quarter Report Template:

Financial KPI Quarter Report Templates:

Retail Marketing Quarter Report Templates:

Logistics Quarter Report Templates:

If you are interested in more FineReport demo, or you want to talk with our product expert to design your personalized demo, don’t hesitate to click the button and book a demo.

Summary of the Quarterly Report

If you want to create a professional and well-organized Quarterly Report quickly, consider using FineReport. With FineReport, you can access various Quarterly Report templates, making it easy to create a report in no time. No credit card is needed, download FineReport for free now and get started on creating your Quarterly Report.