The Status Report: Progress, Risk and Decision Needed

A status report carries three sections: progress, risk, and decision needed. Progress says where the work stands against a defined finish. Risk says what could stop it and what is being done about each item. Decision needed says which answer the writer needs from somebody else, and by when. The decision needed section is what makes the report worth sending.

Underneath that sits a single purpose. A status report exists to move work that has stopped. Everything else about it is secondary. If nothing is blocked and nothing is needed from anybody, the report is a courtesy and a record. If something is blocked, the report is the mechanism by which somebody other than the writer unblocks it, and that is the whole reason the format is worth learning rather than improvising each week.

Almost every weak status report fails in the same place: it describes activity beautifully and never asks for anything. Think of a plumber halfway through a bathroom. A good update is not two paragraphs on which pipes have been laid. The useful update is that the second bathroom is on hold because nobody has chosen the tiles, and the tiler is booked for Thursday. Everything else the plumber could say is true, interesting and useless.

One assignment runs through this guide. The Kavery research desk, inside Kavery Capital Services Private Limited, was producing a written assessment of Meenakshi Tubes Private Limited, a borrower the desk already lends to. Sharada Iyer did the work, Prakash Nadar reviewed it, Latha Menon took the decision at the end. Every week Sharada Iyer sent Latha Menon a report of one printed side. The report of 8 March is the one taken apart below.

The borrower's product does not matter to a single rule of the format. The subject is a form rather than a business. Substitute a bond, a fund, a warehouse or a single machine for Meenakshi Tubes Private Limited and not one rule moves.

What is a status report for, and who is it actually written for?

A status reportA short, regular report on where an assignment stands and what it needs from somebody else. is written for the one person who can change the outcome and is not doing the work. The definition rules out most of what people put in one. A status report is not a diary, and not a defence of how the week was spent. Nor is it written as a record for the file, though it usually becomes one.

Asked the other way round, the question gets easier. Which action could the reader take this week that would change how the work turns out? The reader could answer a question. The reader could release a document, accept a slip, or refuse one and move something else. The reader could decide that a risk the writer has flagged is worse than the writer thinks. The short list of four actions is the entire useful surface of the report, and every sentence in it should be pointed at one of them.

Once that is accepted, a good deal falls away. Effort falls away first. The reader cannot make the writer's week easier retrospectively. Detail about method falls away next. Nobody checks a method inside a report of one printed side, and the reader would not be equipped to if they tried. Reassurance falls away hardest of all. A sentence written to make the reader feel comfortable is the single clearest sign that the writer has forgotten who the report is for.

There is a second reader, and it is worth naming because it changes nothing about the format and a great deal about the discipline. The second reader is the writer, six weeks later, trying to remember when a thing was known. A weekly report is a dated sequence of what the desk believed at the time. The sequence survives as part of the record even after the work is delivered and the decision is taken.

How to Write a Finance Status Report: What Are the Three Sections, and Why Exactly Three?

Three sections, in this order: progress, risk, decision needed. The order is not decorative and it is not alphabetical. The three sections are ordered by who has to act, and the sequence runs writer, writer, reader. Progress describes something the writer has done. Risk describes something the writer is managing. Decision needed describes something the reader has to do, and putting it last means the report ends on the only line that requires a response.

Why not four sections, or six? Because a fourth section always turns out to be one of the three wearing a different label. Next steps is progress written in the future tense. Issues is risk that already happened, and it belongs inside the risk section with a date beside it or in the standing log. Achievements is progress with an adjective. Every extra heading dilutes the one section that has to be read, and a reader who has learned there are three sections learns very quickly which one to read first.

Why not fewer? Drop decision needed and the report becomes a broadcast: accurate, weekly, and incapable of changing anything. Drop risk and the reader discovers a problem only when it has already cost something. Drop progress and the reader has no way to judge whether the risk and the request are proportionate. A request to delay by a week reads completely differently at 20 per cent complete and at 90 per cent.

How is progress stated so that it actually means something?

Progress is a fraction, and a fraction needs a denominator. The denominator is the defined finishThe agreed thing that counts as done, named in advance, against which progress is measured.: the specific thing that counts as done, named before the work started and agreed by the person reading the report. On the Kavery assignment the defined finish was the reviewed memo circulated to the committee on 11 March, twenty four hours before the meeting. Not the analysis finished. Not the numbers checked. A named artefact, on a named date, in somebody's hands.

With that in place, 60 per cent is a claim somebody can check. Without it, 60 per cent is how confident the writer felt on the morning they wrote the report, and the giveaway is that it moves in both directions. A progress number that can fall without any work being undone was never measuring the work; it was measuring the mood.

How the desk got to 60 per cent is worth showing. The arithmetic is ordinary and nobody teaches it. The assignment was planned as four steps totalling 540 minutes of production: 45 minutes to define the question, 240 to gather, 120 to compute, 135 to draft. By 8 March the first two steps were finished, a total of 285 minutes, and 39 minutes of the computing step were done. The finished work is 324 minutes, and 324 of 540 is exactly 60.0 per cent. Anybody can rebuild that number from the same two lines.

Why does a percentage need a denominator somebody agreed to?

Because the same work supports several different percentages, all of them honest, and the reader cannot tell which one they are being handed. The assignment had a review pass sitting after the drafting, planned at 40 minutes. Include it and the clock is 580 minutes rather than 540. The same 324 minutes of completed work is then 55.9 per cent rather than 60.0 per cent, a gap of 4.1 points on a week where nothing whatsoever changed except the choice of denominator.

Four points is not a scandal. Four points becomes a scandal the week the reader is deciding whether to hold a meeting date. The numbers 60 and 56 sit on opposite sides of the informal line at which people start asking questions. The fix is one clause, not one paragraph: name the denominator in the same sentence as the percentage, every week, in the same words. Sixty per cent of the 540 minutes of production, review not included. The clause costs nine words and removes the entire argument.

What belongs under risk, and what is just worrying out loud?

A riskSomething that has not happened yet and that could change the finish date or the answer if it did. in a status report is not everything that could conceivably go wrong. The risk section is a short list, and every entry carries an action beside it. A risk with no action is a complaint. A reader who receives three complaints in a row starts reading the whole section as background noise, and the cost lands on the fourth item, the one that matters.

The action does not have to solve the risk. The action has to be something the writer is doing about the risk, stated in the present tense, so the reader knows whether their attention is required. Using the filing and marking the extract superseded is an action. Monitoring the situation is not, and everybody knows it is not.

How long should the section be? On a report of one printed side, one to three items. If a week produces nine risks, they are not nine risks; they are a standing list of everything imaginable, and that belongs in a log rather than in a weekly report. The report is a selection from the log, and making that selection is the judgement the reader is paying for.

What is the one test that decides whether something is a risk?

One question, asked in the same words every week. Could this change the finish date, or could it change the answer? If either is yes, it is a risk and it goes in the section with an action beside it. If both are no, it is a worry, and a worry belongs in the writer's own head or in a conversation, not in a document somebody has to read on a Monday morning.

Run the 8 March item through it. A forwarded extract of the borrower's accounts carried revenue of Rs 20,90,00,000. The filed accounts, held as item 3 of the source log for this assignment, carried Rs 21,20,00,000. The difference is Rs 30,00,000, or 1.4 per cent of the filed figure. A 1.4 per cent difference on an input sounds small enough to ignore, and that is exactly why the test is asked rather than eyeballed.

Work it through. Operating profit for the year was Rs 2,30,00,000 in both versions. Divide it by the filed revenue and operating margin is 10.8 per cent. Divide it by the extract and it is 11.0 per cent. The answer moved 0.16 points, and 0.16 points is the entire distance between sitting below the desk's invented internal floor of 11 per cent and sitting on it. A 1.4 per cent error in an input moved the conclusion from one side of a line to the other. The test looks for exactly that, and a glance at the size of the number would never have found it.

What is a decision needed, and what does the line have to contain?

A decision neededSomething the reader has to do or settle before the work can continue as planned. is the section where description stops and asking begins. The line has four parts, and a line missing any of them is a comment rather than a request. Part one is what is needed. Part two is from whom, by name. Part three is by when, as a date. Part four is what happens if it does not arrive by that date.

The fourth part is the one people leave off, and it is the one that makes the line get answered. Without it the reader is holding a question with no cost attached, and a question with no cost attached goes to the bottom of a pile of things that do have costs attached. Writing the consequence down is not rudeness. The consequence is the only way the reader can weigh the request against the eleven other things asking for the same twenty minutes.

Here is the line from the 8 March report, in full. Whether to wait for a revised filing from the borrower or to deliver on the accounts as currently filed. Needed from Latha Menon by 10 March. If it arrives later than that, the memo does not circulate on 11 March and the meeting date moves with it. Four parts, one sentence each, and it was answered the same day it was sent.

Why is decision needed the section most often left empty?

Three reasons, and none of them is laziness. The first is that asking feels like admitting to being stuck, and the whole training of a junior analyst points the other way. The second is that a request creates a record: if the request went in on 8 March and nobody replied, the delay is now visibly not the writer's, and that feels like a political move even when it is simply a fact. The third is the quiet one. The risk section already exists, so a writer with a question often writes it there instead, and putting it there feels like the question has been raised.

The third reason is the dangerous one. The writer genuinely believes the question has been asked, and the reader genuinely never sees a question at all. A risk is understood as something the writer is managing. Managing is what the word risk means in a status report. So a question dressed as a risk is read, understood, and filed under things being handled, exactly the outcome the writer did not want.

How often should the report go out, and why does a fixed day beat a triggered one?

Fixed cadenceHow often a report goes out, set as a rule in advance rather than decided each week., decided once, at the start. The same day every week, whether or not anything happened. The alternative, sending a report when there is something to report, sounds more efficient and is worse in three separate ways.

First, a triggered report only fires once somebody already knows there is a problem, and that is precisely the moment it stops being early. Second, it makes silence ambiguous: no report this week could mean a quiet week or a disaster, and the reader has no way to tell the two apart without asking. Asking is work pushed onto the reader. Third, it removes the small forced pause in which a writer looks at their own work and notices that computation has been sitting at a third done for six days.

The arithmetic in the case makes the point. The discrepancy between the extract and the filing was noticed on 4 March. Under a fixed weekly report it reached Latha Menon on 8 March, four days later, and was answered the same day. Under a triggered report there was nothing yet to declare a problem about, so the earliest it would have surfaced is 11 March, when the memo failed to appear. A fixed day converts a discovery into a dated communication automatically, and a triggered report waits for somebody to decide that the thing has become bad enough to mention.

Status Report vs RAID Log: Which One Holds What?

The two documents sit beside each other on the same assignment and they are not duplicates. A RAID logA standing table of risks, assumptions, issues and dependencies, one row for each item. holds one row for each risk, assumption, issue and dependency (RAID). The log is a state: everything standing, all the time, whether or not it moved this week. A status report is a delta: what changed since the last one, and what is needed now. The log answers what is true, and the report answers what is new, and neither question can be answered by the other document.

On the Kavery assignment the log ran to 18 rows, being 4 risks, 9 assumptions, 2 issues and 3 dependencies. Every one of those 18 rows was standing on 8 March. The report that day named one risk and one decision. Seventeen rows of the log went unmentioned, not because they had gone away but because none of them had moved and none of them needed the reader. The silence is the report doing its job: the report is a selection, and the selection is the writer's judgement made visible.

Notice which way the borrowing runs. The report is built from the log, never the other way round. If a risk appears in a report and is not in the log, the log has fallen behind. If a new issueA risk that has already happened, so it is a fact to be managed rather than a possibility to be watched. is logged and the reader has not been told, the report has fallen behind. Keeping both is not duplication, for the same reason that a bank statement and a payment confirmation are not duplication: one is the standing position and one is the event that just happened.

What did the report of 8 March actually say?

One printed side, three sections, set out in full below. The report reads first as a document, and then as three sections to be weighed against everything above.

The cost of that report and what it bought are worth setting side by side. The report runs to about 250 words and took perhaps ten minutes to write. Progress and risk together take up two thirds of the report and changed nothing: both were accurate, both would have been read and nodded at, and the work would have proceeded identically without either. The single decision needed line is the whole return on the document, and it was answered the same day it was sent. The 11 March circulation held because of that answer.

One more thing is visible only because there were three reports rather than one. Progress went 25 per cent, then 50, then 60. The third week added ten points where the two before it added twenty five each. The flattening is not hidden in the report; it sits immediately above a risk section explaining that a provenance question was live and a filing might change. A single report cannot show a slowdown. A sequence of them shows it without anybody having to say the word.

How does a lender, an analyst or somebody working alone use a status report?

A credit officer supervising four analysts reads the reports in a fixed order and it is not the order they were written in. Decision needed first, across all four. The decision needed lines are the things that will stop moving if nobody touches them today. Then risk, scanning for anything that could change an answer rather than a date. Progress last, and often not at all. Reading the reports in reverse section order puts the reader's own workload at the top rather than the writer's, and the habit is worth copying.

An analyst supervising nobody uses the report differently: as a commitment device. Writing down that computation is 39 minutes into 120 is uncomfortable in a way that thinking it is not, and writing it down beside last week's number is more uncomfortable still. The document does to the analyst's own work what a reviewer would do if there were one, and that is a fair description of most professional habits worth acquiring.

Somebody working entirely alone, with no reader at all, gets the most from this, and it is worth spelling out because the format looks like corporate furniture. The report is written anyway, to oneself, on the same day each week. The decision needed section becomes whatever is being waited on from outside: a document, a reply, a price, a signature. A household planning a wedding runs the same three lines without ever calling it a report. The three lines are what is booked, what could go wrong and what is being done about it, and what somebody else has to confirm by Thursday. The third line is why the caterer gets called on Wednesday rather than the following Monday.

One habit closes the loop, and it takes a minute. Before sending, the writer reads the decision needed section on its own and asks whether a reader who reads nothing else could act on it. If the answer is no, the request is either missing a part or is sitting in the wrong section, and both of those are fixed in the sixty seconds before the report goes rather than in the four days after it.

The Kavery research desk, Kavery Capital Services Private Limited, Meenakshi Tubes Private Limited, Sharada Iyer, Prakash Nadar and Latha Menon are invented.
Educational material. Not advice on any investment, tax, budget or market position.