Types of Project Management Reports

Project Management Reports tell you everything you need to know about a project, a task, time spent, your schedule, and much more. Reports can be created in seconds and shared with anyone, anytime, from anywhere. Plus, they look great — on the web, in presentations, and when printed.

Reports come in different types, grouped by Project, Profitability, Task, and Time report. These can be selected when you add or edit a report from the Type drop-down.

A few benefits of project reports are as follows:

1. Easy tracking of current progress for everyone associated with the project

2. Early risk identification to take suitable actions and mitigate its impact

3. Effective budget management by tracking expenditure

4. Better visibility and control of different aspects related to a project

In the ProProfs Project, you can generate project reports in two ways:

• Manually create a report by using the data of the project
•  Click on three dots or the kebab menu icon and select ‘View Report’ from the drop-down. 

In this article, you’ll learn about:

1. Summary Reports

2. Project Profitability Reports

3. Timeline Reports

4. Time Reports

5. Comment Reports

 Summary Reports

The summary reports (Project and Task Summary) tell you the most important things about your projects and tasks, such as progress, due date, and current status in an easily digestible format.

ProProfs lets you customize reports. You can set various filters on what data is shown, specify in what order items appear, and you can choose to show or hide multiple columns.

Reports are best used to overview a project, see when specific tasks are due, how complete they are based on progress and status, and who is working on what. In addition, it helps in early risk identification by providing better visibility of aspects and gives you complete control over the project.

Customizing Reports

When you add or edit a summary report, advanced options are at the bottom of the form to customize certain aspects of the report. For example, in the project and task summary reports, you can choose what columns show, hide the charts, or show the descriptions of projects and tasks.

Expanded Tasks

For some types of reports, you can choose whether you expand to tasks and subtasks or not. The default shows all depths (expanded) of tasks and sub-tasks, but you can disable this option and show the parent if you wish.

Filters

Many filters can be applied, for example, by project, client, user, tag, status, date range, and so on. The filters you will have access to depend on what type of report you are displaying.

Exporting

You can export the data in the report to CSV by clicking the ‘Export to CSV’ button. We’ll do our best to match the filters you have set up, e.g., open projects or a date range, but the data won’t always be precisely what you see in the report.

You can find more information on data exporting in our Developers section.

 Project Profitability Reports

The project profitability report lets you track your project expenditure compared to your budget allocation. It provides a detailed overview of total costs incurred versus your set budget and displays your profit margin.

Financial Summary

It is a summary of finances related to your project. It shows ‘Cost to Date,’ consisting of two components: Total Timesheets and Total Expenses.

1. ‘Total Timesheets’ include total hours of work multiplied by hourly rate.

2. ‘Total Expenses’ means the overhead expenses related to your project.

The report shows the profit margin after deducting ‘Cost To Date’ from ‘Budget Amount.’

How is the accumulated cost?

Here, you get a graphical representation of the aggregate cost versus the budget amount for the total duration of work.

How is the daily spend?

You can track daily expenditure in this graph, including timesheets cost and overhead expenses.

How is the accumulated time tracked?

It displays the cumulative amount spent on the project versus estimated budget hours.

Timesheet Details

Based on the hourly rate, it provides detailed information about tasks, hours spent, and total cost.

Expense Details

It includes any extra costs incurred during the project.

 Timeline Reports

Timeline Reports or Project Timeline reports can be referred to as ‘Gantt charts,’ although in ProProfs Project, we simplify the chart just to show a timeline of the start and due dates. This report gives you a clear picture of how a project spans across a month and whether the milestones conflict with one another.

The colors shown in these reports are inherited from the project or task. The same color is also used in the Calendar to distinguish between different events. You can change the color by editing the project or task and opening the advanced options.

Timelines will span multiple pages depending on the date range you have selected. For example, if you have January 1st to April 1st chosen, you’ll see January 1st to 31st on the first page (there’s a maximum of 31 days for each page), then February 1st to March 3rd on the second page (31 days), and March 4th to April 1st on the last page. The idea behind this is that you should be able to print out the reports, and the days should be lined up continuously with each other.

 Time Reports

You can also create various reports for time spent on projects. There are six different types of reports to display how time is spent. Each one represents a different grouping of time entries. For example, they are grouped by project, user, individual time entry, etc.

Each report also contains pie charts that show how time is spent in a visual representation. For example, time spent on each project. You can switch off the charts in the Advanced Options.

Time by Project

The Time by Project report shows time spent grouped by project, separated by each client (if you filter by All Clients). This report can show project descriptions and the Estimated time vs Actual time for projects.

Time by Task

The Time by Task report shows time spent grouped by task, separated by the project (if you filter by All Projects). This report can show task descriptions and the Estimated time vs Actual time for tasks.

Time by Entry

The Time by Entry report shows each time entry, along with the user who logged the time entry, the sub-task (if applicable), and the description (if enabled), separated by task.

Time by User

The Time by User report shows the time spent grouped by user, separated by the project (if you filter by All Projects). You can still filter by the user in this report if you wish.

Time by Client

The Time by Client report shows a simple breakdown of time spent grouped by clients.

Time by Day

The Time by Day report shows a simple breakdown of time spent grouped by day.

Comment Reports

Comment Reports let you view all the comments going on in the project. Here's an example of how the comments report appears to you:

How to Access the Comment Reports

Step 1: On your ProProfs Project dashboard, navigate to Custom Report on the left panel under the Reports tab.

Step 2: Click the "+Add Report" button on the far right of your screen to create a new custom report.

Step 3: In the report form, enter the report name, select “Comment Summary” as the report type, and click Save.

The comment report will be added to the Reports dashboard.  

That is all about different types of reports in the ProProfs Project and their usage.