Weekly Status Report

Successful teams use a weekly status report to communicate effectively and keep up-to-date on everyone’s progress, plans and problems. There are many ways to share status reports, whether manually, through an email or Google Document, or using an automated tool.

The classic problem with doing status reports manually is that sometimes people just forget. They don’t submit on time, they forget to include certain information or they get distracted and don’t do it. This breaks the communication process that status reports are designed to help.

The best way to solve this problem is by using status report software.

How weekly status report software works

1. Create a list of questions that you want team members to answer each week

2. Enter each team member’s email address

3. Each team member receives an automatic email with a link to a form to enter the status report

4. When each person enters their report, the software automatically saves it to a web-based dashboard and emails it to the team

The beauty of software compared to doing status reports manually is that the software will automatically email each person every week to ask for the status report, and send additional reminders if someone forgets to submit. Their answers are automatically stored in a web-based dashboard for the manager to review, and optionally can be sent as an email or PDF to the team.

Must-have features for weekly status report software

When selecting good status report software, it’s important to ensure it meets the following criteria:

• Easy to use
• No extra work for the team
• Customizable to fit with how your work

Based on these criteria, I recommend trying Weekly Update. It’s a simple tool that makes status reports a breeze. Despite the name, it actually works with daily, bi-weekly and monthly reports as well. You can set up your team in less than 5 minutes, with plenty of free templates and pre-loaded questions to use for your updates.

Benefits of Weekly Update

With Weekly Update, you can customize your update form to include any questions you want.

Your team members can use Weekly Update completely from their email inbox. They never have to sign up, download an app or install anything to submit their status update.

You can use Weekly Update for free, or upgrade for larger teams. Given the ease of use, flexibility and no extra work for the team, Weekly Update may be the best status report software available.