Tempo logotype
6 min read

Understanding CEO reports: The executive’s toolkit

Learn the essential elements of a CEO report, including topics, data sources, and formatting, with our comprehensive template.
From Team '23

Tempo Team

A CEO report is essential for documenting a company’s overall health. It charts the organization’s progress toward goals, objectives, achievements, and outcomes.

The report includes data that senior leadership uses to evaluate its strategies and guide its decisions for the upcoming reporting period. The chief executive officer publishes the report as part of the monthly board meeting agenda and distributes it among delegates, key stakeholders, and employees.

Although CEO reports cover a lot of ground, they follow a standard format. Once you’ve drafted your first, you can use it as a template to speed up the creation of subsequent documents. Here’s what you need to know to get that first report under your belt.

What is a CEO report?

A CEO report offers insight into an organization’s overall health, progress, and trajectory by reviewing its performance, key initiatives, and strategic outlook over the chosen period. 

The report provides the board of directors, shareholders, and employees a high-level glimpse into the company’s current status, including:

  • Financial highlights

  • Operational updates

  • Key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics

The document serves as a critical analytical tool, distilling past trends and real-time insights into a visually digestible and intuitive format using videos, graphics, and interactive charts. CEOs may distribute the report as a physical document or a digital file, depending on the preferences of the board of directors and the executive team. 

CEO reports benefit the company by delivering:

  • Data to inform decision-making

  • Universal access to critical information

  • Improved relations and communication between the CEO, board members, and executive team

  • Increased employee engagement and confidence in company leaders 

What should you include in a CEO report?

To answer questions and guide the decisions of the board of directors, the CEO report should communicate the following elements:

Executive summary

Offer a brief overview of central insights into the company’s performance for the relevant period.

Financial performance: 

Profile the company’s bottom line by including data from critical financial metrics, such as:

  • Gross profit margins

  • Production

  • Operating expenses

  • Monthly revenue

  • Customer lifetime value and acquisition costs

Operational achievements

Include any significant news regarding:

  • Revenue and earned profits

  • HR metrics, including hiring, current team size, and employee morale

  • Product roadmap and updates

  • Feature launches

  • Marketing campaigns

Updates on needle-moving strategies and initiatives

Deliver a status update on the company’s strategic plans, corporate vision, and operating policies.

Challenges and opportunities for improvement

Provide background on topics currently blocking the company from attaining peak operational efficiency and results.

Trends and competition

Outline the latest consumer trends, industry developments, and technological advancements that affect the company’s position within the marketplace and that of its competitors.

Significant events

Discuss any changes in corporate leadership, business operations, or government regulations that impact business activities.

Future state

Provide an overview of the next steps, including plans to capitalize on development and growth opportunities (e.g., strategic adjustments to address shortfalls or re-align operations with long-term goals).  

Step-by-step guide for writing a CEO report

Your first CEO report may seem daunting, but you’ve worked your entire career for this responsibility, proving you have the know-how. An organized approach will ensure you cover all the bases. 

1. Define the report’s audience

CEO reports focus on one of two audiences: company employees or stakeholders and investors.

If the document targets staff, collaborate with HR to spotlight high-performing leaders within the team and discuss current and future hiring needs.

For reports addressing stakeholder interests, include information on the company’s finances and growth plans. Before publishing, consult with the CFO to ensure your report complies with regulatory requirements and safeguards sensitive information. 

2. Collect and review data

Summarize the organization’s activities and decisions for the reporting period. Provide a holistic view of the company’s current position by gathering data to outline specific outcomes, be they positive, negative, or neutral.

3. Summarize key points

The bulk of your CEO report reviews significant developments and offers insights into the company’s future using up-to-date data. It may be tempting to gloss over company shortfalls, but such a decision risks damaging accountability and eroding trust.

Instead, be forthcoming and accountable regarding missed targets. Explain the reason you established these goals and why the outcomes fell short.

4. Offer recommendations and establish action plans

Follow up on the previous section with a plan to maintain successes and avoid repeating mistakes. Outline your action plan to progress toward milestones using practical steps and a realistic timeframe. 

5. Draft the report

Bring all these elements together into a concise, detailed document that follows a logical progression. Ensure you maintain the same voice throughout. Include graphs, charts, and diagrams – with references – to illustrate your data and make it easy for stakeholders to understand and conduct further research. 

As with any document, ask a direct report to proofread the copy before publication. 

Examples and tips for CEO reports

If you’re unsure how to structure your report, try the following template:

Header

  • Company logo

  • Branded color scheme

  • Proprietary font for titles, headings, and subheadings

Introduction

  • CEO Report: (Month/Quarter/Year)

  • Report date

  • Executive summary

  • Key performance indicators (KPIs)

Fiscal performance (for stakeholder audience)

  • Current revenue compared to the previous reporting period

  • Profit margins (gross versus net margins)

  • Expense breakdown

Operational efficiency

  • Output metrics or production levels

  • Quality control outcomes (defect rates or improvement measures)

  • Inventory management (turnover and stock levels)

Market performance

  • Market share compared to competitors

  • New customer acquisition and market expansion

  • Customer churn rates and retention strategies 

Employee morale

  • Productivity metrics or performance indicators

  • Survey results or feedback measuring employee engagement

  • Professional development strategies such as training initiatives, promotions, and retention rates

  • Staff highlights and achievements

Conclusion

  • Improvement opportunities and focus areas

  • Action plans

  • Future outlook

Additional tips

One of the best data sources for creating a CEO report is your team’s reporting tools. These platforms can provide invaluable insight into operational performance, productivity, and outcomes:

  • IT service management

  • Task management

  • Project management

  • Customer service management

As CEO, you’re responsible for the company’s big picture. You probably don’t work with these systems. Direct reports provide regular status updates that include this data, or you can find a tool to help you access the information independently.

One such reporting tool is Atlassian Confluence. Confluence integrates fully with Jira platforms, allowing you to create a reporting dashboard that gathers the KPIs, metrics, and other necessary data from these various sources into one location. 

But native Confluence functionality only goes so far. To extend your executive dashboard, download Tempo’s Custom Jira Charts for Confluence. It offers more flexibility for filtering, visualizing, and reporting on company data. 

Custom Charts not only facilitate data analysis but also convert data into graphs and charts. These visual representations highlight issue statuses across all Jira projects, identify at-risk issues, and display yearly sales revenue growth. By customizing and incorporating these data visualizations into your reports, you can clearly and effectively showcase your company's performance to readers. 

Tempo can help you with CEO reports

Combine Custom Charts with Strategic Roadmaps to create roadmaps of your strategic and operational plans. Strategic Roadmaps helps capture stakeholder attention by illustrating priorities, milestones, and dependencies while charting progress toward company goals. You can even embed Strategic Roadmaps into your executive dashboard in Confluence.  

With CEO reporting, you’ve got a lot of ground to cover. Roadmaps can be your secret weapon to optimize the process. Use the application to visualize what work you’ve completed and what’s left.

By leveraging the power of Tempo, you’ll handle CEO reporting like a boss.

Sign up for a demo

Register

Explore More Content

Strategic Portfolio Management

Strategic Portfolio Management

Modern modular PPM solutions that scale with your business. Align your teams with the integrated platform that bridges the gap between strategy and execution.

Learn more

Centralize real-time plans in one view

Integration: Structure and Gantt Charts

Gain a more complete project management solution, simplifying project reporting, improving collaboration, and ensuring projects stay on time and within budget.

Learn more

Unified time and team management

Integration: Timesheets and Capacity Planner

Seamlessly manage project timelines and resources while accurately tracking time spent on tasks. This integration enhances visibility, improves planning accuracy, and supports data-driven decision-making for better overall project outcomes.

Learn more

Jira Team & Resource Management

Capacity Planner

#1 Jira Resource Management App: Optimize team allocation, skillset utilization, capacity planning & project management

Go to marketplace

For planning leaders looking to add a big-picture roadmap view to their structured Jira data, this integration is essential. Improve visibility to leadership, reduce reporting admin, and keep your team aligned.

Learn more
Colleagues interacting around a desk

No-Code Power BI Jira Integration

Power BI Connector for Jira

Effortlessly bridge Jira with your preferred BI tool, unlocking unparalleled insights and enhancing decision-making

Learn more

Never lose track of a brilliant idea again

Idea Manager for Strategic Roadmaps

Never lose a brilliant idea again. Idea Manager for Strategic Roadmaps has built-in best practices to help.

Learn more

Powered by Structure’s custom hierarchies, visualize your roadmap, project plans, timeline & dependencies within Jira Gantt charts

Go to marketplace

Industry-leading project plan and roadmap visualizations with a Gantt chart extension

Gantt Charts for Structure PPM

Visualize project plans and roadmaps with a Gantt chart extension for Jira

Learn more

Real-time collaboration and capacity planning in Jira

Capacity Planner

A powerful team resource management tool designed to optimize capacity planning and project management in Jira

Learn more

Custom charts and dashboards for Jira

Custom Charts for Jira

See how work is progressing and where blockers are with the most flexible reporting app in Jira.

Learn more

Project and program management for Jira

Structure PPM

Visualize all your Jira data & manage portfolios of projects in real-time.

Learn more

Take control of your projects

Integration: Portfolio Manager and Jira

Portfolio Manager integrates seamlessly with Jira to give you predictive scheduling, real-time scenario modeling, and advanced resource management – ensuring you stay on track, no matter what challenges arise.

Learn more

Time Tracking Software for Jira

Timesheets

Tempo’s intuitive automation and Jira-native design make it the most trusted time tracking tool for enterprise organization.

Learn more

Jira Time Tracking

Timesheets by Tempo

#1 Jira Time Tracking & AI Apps: Log Tempo Timesheets for Planning, Project Management & Billing. Plugin Office365, Google & Slack

Go to marketplace

Jira Project Cost Tracking

Financial Manager

Project financial management for Jira & Timesheets. Monitor project costs, expenses, revenue, billing & budgets. Track Capex/Opex

Go to marketplace

Get the data you need to succeed

Time Tracker

Extend your Jira with prebuilt and highly configurable reports for straightforward time tracking.

Learn more

Agile at Scale Software

Agile at Scale

Adapt to changing business needs, rapidly adjust plans, and reallocate investment.

Learn more

Roadmapping software for teams of all sizes

Strategic Roadmaps (Roadmunk)

The roadmapping tool designed for high-performing teams delivering boardroom-ready strategic roadmaps.

Learn more

Unified time and team management

Integration: Timesheets and Structure

Combining Tempo Timesheets and Structure PPM provides a unified view of time tracking and project progress, enabling more accurate reporting and effective portfolio management. Simplify workflows, enhance collaboration, and ensure projects stay on time and within budget.

Learn more

No-code Tableau Jira integration

Tableau Connector for Jira

Effortlessly bridge Jira with Tableau, unlocking unparalleled insights and enhancing decision-making

Learn more

Monitor financial health at every level

Financial Manager for Timesheets

Monitor projects and portfolios to get simple, clear, and real-time views of your costs, budgets, and profits that can be shared throughout your entire organization.

Learn more

Align your organization with proactive portfolio management

Portfolio Manager (LiquidPlanner)

Predictive scheduling and the ability to forecast project timelines and spot risks so you can meet deadlines with confidence.

Learn more

Jira ITSM Solutions with Tempo

ITSM

Build and scale a custom ITSM solution at your own pace with Tempo's modular suite of integrated tools. Enhance Jira's capabilities and take control of your entire IT portfolio.

Learn more

Jira Portfolio Management PPM

Structure by Tempo

Jira Project Portfolio Management (PPM): Visualize data and manage projects within spreadsheet-like tables — in less than a minute

Go to marketplace

AI-enabled capacity visualization

Capacity Insights - Open Beta

Deliver visibility into how your team's time and efforts align with business objectives and project ROI - without the manual effort

Learn more

No-code BigQuery Jira integration

BigQuery Connector for Jira

Integrate Jira with Google BigQuery to seamlessly export and sync data for advanced analytics and customized reporting

Learn more

No more reporting limitations

Custom Charts for Confluence

Create and share all kinds of highly visual and customizable charts directly on your Confluence pages.

Learn more