10 Different Types of Reports for Your Digital Project

There are several different types of reports you can create for your digital project, depending on what you need to show to team members or superiors.

Here are 10 common types:

1. Communication Plan

This preliminary report includes everything you should know about communicating with your team and stakeholders. A communication plan often outlines:

• What kinds of communications will appear in the project: Management meetings, team meetings, management reporting, project records
• Who is involved in the communication: Stakeholders, consultants, managers
• How often the communication will occur: Daily, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly
• What needs to be communicated: KPIs, meeting minutes, details, summaries
• How the information will be distributed: Meetings, papers, email, Slack

2. Project Timeline

A timeline states the proposed course of the digital project from start to finish.

It can be done visually or more traditionally, but the one important common ingredient is to name the dates which will be of interest, like expected milestones.

3. Project Budget/Financial Report

As cost is one of three key elements holding back any given digital project (the other two being scope and schedule), it is vital to create a project budget report.

This financial information should ideally show the budget versus the actual cost, which can help your project with warnings if the numbers start diverging.

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4. Resource Report

A digital project team may be small and tight-knitted, but can also be large and span various departments, companies, and regions.

Creating and maintaining a list of team members, their roles, and contact information will help the team work more efficiently together.

Adding what they will do and when makes the resource report an invaluable tool for project management. In this way, you can allocate people to the right tasks, remove duplicate tasks, schedule additional resources, and so on.

5. Status Report

A status report tells the current state of your digital project, as well as the projected course forward. What information to include depends on the nature of your project, but some common traits may be actions, commits, and numbers.

You must choose the report frequency according to what makes sense. Also set up dashboards and other tools to quickly help you extract the required status information to be distributed.

6. Risk Report

Every digital project, large and small, includes risk factors. A risk report should summarize the risk profile of the project. The greatest risks should be addressed in detail, while the minor risks can be bundled together with an explanation on how you plan to solve them.

Such a report can also include a risk register, where you methodically inventorize any occurrence that may impact your project. Regularly revisit the report to assess the status of both old and new risks.

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7. Project Actions Log

This report is meant for documentation purposes, where every major action item is listed and tracked in an actions log.

Actions give you an overview of the project and what is being done—or not. At the same time, such documentation makes it easier to review the process of the project, learn from mistakes, and highlight successes.

8. Project Dashboard

Senior stakeholders may be too busy to properly digest your reports. An idea to solve this issue may be to craft a project dashboard with interactive graphs and reports, showcasing all the high-level, essential statuses in your digital project.

9. Board/Executive Report

In cases involving the C-suite, you need to create especially tailored reports with relevant high-level information.

The most senior stakeholders need to know the overall progress, the budget status, if KPIs have been reached, and other aspects which they can help resolve.

10. Variance Report

A variance report compares the planned outcome of your digital project to the actual outcome, in terms of cost, completion, goals, and so on.

The variance report gives you a metric to measure whether you are on track, ahead of schedule, or running behind in a given field, allowing you to change course before it’s too late.

First published 22 July 2020, updated 11 August 2025.