What is a status report?
A status report is a short, regular update that tells the people who depend on a piece of work where it stands against the plan: what has been done, what is at risk, and what they need to decide. It is written for readers who are not doing the work themselves, such as a manager, a client, an executive or a steering group, so they can stay informed without asking.
What goes in a status report
Most status reports, whatever their format, answer the same handful of questions:
- Overall status. On track, at risk, or off track, stated in the first line.
- Progress since the last report. What was completed, measured against what was planned.
- What comes next. The work planned before the next report.
- Risks and issues. What could go wrong, what already has, and what is being done about each.
- Decisions needed. Anything the reader has to approve, choose or unblock. This is often the most useful section and the one most often left out.
- Key numbers, where they apply. Schedule, budget and scope for a project, or delivery metrics for a team.
A good status report puts the bad news and the requests near the top. A reader who only looks at the first few lines should come away knowing whether anything needs them.
RAG status
Many organizations summarize status with a traffic light, known as RAG:
- Green: on track, no action needed.
- Amber: at risk; the team has a plan to recover, but the reader should watch it.
- Red: off track; the plan will not be met without a decision or help from the reader.
RAG only works if the thresholds are agreed in advance and applied honestly. A project that shows green every week until it abruptly turns red has a reporting problem, not just a delivery problem.
Types of status report
The term covers several documents that differ mainly in audience and cadence.
| Type | Written for | Usually sent | Main question it answers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Project status report | Sponsors, stakeholders, clients | Weekly or fortnightly | Is the project on schedule, budget and scope? |
| Weekly team status report | A manager or leadership | Weekly | What did the team deliver, and what is at risk? |
| Daily or end-of-day report | A manager or client | Daily | What did one person do today, and what is blocked? |
The project status report is the formal one, common in project management and consulting. The weekly team status report is lighter and follows a team rather than a single project. The daily report is the most granular, often written by individuals, and is especially common for remote staff and contractors reporting to a client in another time zone.
Status report vs progress report
The two terms are often used interchangeably. Where people do draw a line, a status report is a snapshot of where things stand right now, and a progress report looks at how much has changed over a period, often against milestones. In practice, most weekly reports do a little of both.
Status report vs standup
A standup meeting is for teammates coordinating with each other, spoken and brief. A status report is for people outside the day-to-day work, written and more complete. Teams run into trouble when one tries to do the other's job: a standup that becomes a status report for the manager stops helping the team, and a status report assembled from memory at the end of the week misses what actually happened on Tuesday.
Templates
- The weekly status report template covers the team version: summary, shipped, on track, at risk, decisions needed, and next week.
- The end-of-day report template covers the daily version for one person.
Both can be filled in on the page and copied into Slack or an email.
Where Eodly fits
The hardest part of a status report is getting accurate inputs without chasing people for them. Eodly collects a short daily check-in from each person in Slack, Telegram or Discord (Microsoft Teams coming soon), weighs each claim against what actually moved in GitHub and Linear, and sends the lead one sourced report each evening. On the Scale plan, it also rolls those daily reports up into weekly and monthly summaries.