How to Write a Great Business Consulting Report: Best Practices and Report Examples

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Businesses are often faced with problems, no matter the stage of development they’re in. They can usually rely on in-house expertise, but sometimes, their problems or plans require specialized training they just don’t have.

Enter consultants. Businesses hire these professionals to solve problems they can’t. Consultants provide expertise and advice to their clients, helping them solve their problems and clearing a path to growth and development.

One essential tool in a consultant’s toolbox is a business consulting report. These business reports provide a detailed examination of an organization’s problems and are crucial if the management is serious about solving them.

A comprehensive report is the best way for a consultant to show their skills and expertise. So if you want to be better at writing consulting reports, you’re at the right place.

We’ll examine what they are, why they’re important, and how to create an effective business consulting report.

• What Is a Business Consulting Report?
• Why Create a Consulting Report?
• What Should Be Included in a Consulting Report?
• How Long Should a Consultancy Report Be?
• How to Write a Consultancy Report
• How to Present a Consulting Report
• Consultant Report Examples and Templates
• How to Create Better Business Consulting Reports with Databox

What Is a Business Consulting Report?

It’s really not complicated. A consulting report is a document (more commonly a set of documents) you send to your clients to report on your progress on the project you’re consulting on.

The exact type and format of the report depend on the project and the information your clients need or want to see. While you can send your report as a simple email (or a Word document accompanied by Excel spreadsheets or a PowerPoint presentation), the best option is to make use of interactive and customizable dashboards.

Businesses use consulting reports to keep track of the projects they hired consultants for and to monitor consultant performance. They’re valuable and reliable sources of information that inform policy and lead to better decision-making in the future.

Why Create a Consulting Report?

Managing a business is a challenging task, and most business owners and managers have to deal with a lot of different tasks. Unfortunately, few of them (if any) truly have the broad set of skills required to solve every single problem in their business.

That’s why they turn to consultants and consulting agencies who can provide expertise and help solve their issues. These services are necessary for growth since no single business has an in-house solution for everything.

This brings us to consulting reports. They are useful to clients because they give them insight into the progress a consultant is making on a consulting project. They’re useful to consultants because they allow them to keep track of how their projects are going. In addition, since business consulting reports lay out the project in detail, they can help consultants improve their future performance and ensure better planning for the future.

So without further ado, let’s dive straight into the steps involved in creating a consulting report!

What Should Be Included in A Consulting Report?

Consulting reports vary depending on a variety of factors, including the specifics of the task, the field they’re consulting in, and the company they’re consulting for. However, following a consistent general outline is necessary if you want to ensure you give the clients a well-organized and comprehensive report.

Here are some components that should find their way into the majority of consultant reports:

• Title Page – The title page introduces what the report is about. Here, you can include the title, introduction, and the client’s name.
• Table of Contents – Follow up the title page with a table of contents. Simply list the sections of your report and note their corresponding page numbers. Additionally, can include subheadings or subtopics, allowing the readers to skim the table of content and go to the section that interests them.
• Executive Summary – This section (shockingly) summarizes the whole thing in as few pages as possible. You’ll give your readers a rough idea of what to expect and emphasize what the report is about. The summary provides a concise explanation of all the important information in the report and highlights analysis, problems, solutions, recommendations, and conclusions. You can create a repeatable executive summary template to help you spread up the process.
• Introduction – The next step is writing an introduction. This is your chance to leave a good first impression, so make sure to match the tone to the expected audience. In addition to setting the tone, this section addresses the main issues and problems that require your expertise. Provide brief details about the problems and mention the approaches and methods you’ll use to analyze and solve them.
• Background – It’s often useful to include background information. Results of the previous report, expectations, brief outline of previous efforts (if any) on the project or similar projects, market forces at play, etc. This section overlaps somewhat with the Introduction, and you may want to combine the two in order to make the report more concise or if there isn’t much to say in one of them.
• Client Profile – As it says on the tin, cover information about your client in this section. This includes the basics like business address, industry, specializations, size, past and current efforts, and other relevant information.
• Objectives – This section should outline and define the short-term and long-term goals of the report.
• Observations (Analysis) – This will probably be the biggest part of your consulting report. As a part of your job as a consultant, you have to gather information by observing and collecting data about the client’s field and performance. You need information about individual employees, the management model, and even the entire decisionmaking process.
• Appendix (Optional) – This is an optional section but it can be very useful both for you and your client. Here, you can provide citations, references, attachments (photographs, additional documents, etc.), or other information that supports your report and backs up your conclusions.

PRO TIP: How to Track the Right Metrics for Your SaaS Company

It’s not easy to know which KPIs to track for sales, marketing, and customer success in a SaaS company. There are many possibilities, and so much to do! Why not start with the basic metrics that determine the health of your company?

1. Sales (Gross) Volume: How much revenue did your sales team bring in this month, this quarter, or this year?
2. MRR Growth: How fast are you growing revenues from recurring subscriptions?
3. Customers: How many customers do you have right now?
4. Customer Churn Rate: What’s your customer churn rate, and how much revenue have you lost to churn?

If you want to track these in Stripe, you can do it easily by building a plug-and-play dashboard that takes your Stripe customer data and automatically visualizes the right metrics to allow you to monitor your SaaS revenue performance at a glance.

You can easily set it up in just a few clicks – no coding required.

To set up this Stripe dashboard, follow these 3 simple steps:

Step 1: Get the template

Step 2: Connect your Stripe account with Databox.

Step 3: Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.