Report Writing Training

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Australia Wide, including Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney, Adelaide. Perth, Canberra. Parramatta. Geelong. Gold Coast.

Reports are essential to any company's information flow. Reports inform people about what is happening and help them to react accordingly. reports can include reports about the company’s finances, human resources, transactions and even public relations. All of them are meant to communicate a message and keep employees informed. This is possible only if the report is purposeful and well-written. This course will help you and your team to create business reports that are coherent and clear.

Business reports form part of the blood that circulates information around any company. Misinformation and poorly written business reports can lead to misinformed decisions by employees or divisions. It is essential that all employees in a company or business learn to create a strong, purpose-driven business reports that are concise and clear. This will help your team identify the purpose of the report, to focus on clarity, coherence, and to remove any irrelevant information. This course is crucial in helping employees contribute positively to the company's informational flow. This course is a good complement to sessions on informational flow, business writing, objective targeting, and other topics. Contact us if you are interested in our report-writing training courses or services. We are helping companies and teams become their best selves. Your team might be next.

Find Your Purpose

We discuss with participants the need for purposed. The first thing to always establish in your business report is your purpose. You are writing this to make a point, or deliver information. This needs to be clear from the very first thing that anyone reads on the report. Answering the various standard questions can prevent aimlessness, and provide a target for your letter, so you don’t have to do a lot of pointless backtracking or needless editing later. Who is the report for? What is the report supposed to be telling them? Where and when are they meant to receive it? Why did you write this report? How are they meant to receive it? This gives you a solid template to work with, and then you can just fill in some basic blanks. For example, Frank has to write a business report to the finance division of his company. He knows that he has to address it to the finance advisor of the company, and that his report has to arrive on or before a certain time. He is supposed to be telling the financial advisor that recently, he and several employees have discovered that they have not been receiving their sales reports, and with no clear reason why. The purpose of his report is then to make an inquiry at the finance division and work with them to find a solution to their missing sales reports. Frank then writes a physical copy for the advisor to be placed on his desk, but he also sends an e-mail version, just to be sure the advisor receives it. This is an example of a basic template build to a business report, and makes for a solid basis in report writing. Activities for the participants in the course demonstrate the need for purpose.

Avoid Fogging Up Their Glasses

It is important to remember not to make the report too wordy, or to use unnecessarily complicated words. The purpose of a report is to get your point across in as effective a manner a possible, and that means that they shouldn’t have to spend all day trying to decipher what you sent them. However, this does not mean that you have an excuse to be unprofessional in the name of conciseness. Use simple words, and keep an active voice in your report so they remain engaged in reading it to the end. You should avoid using passive voices, like “I might recommend that you check your e-mails more often.” A better example of a simple, professional sentence in a report would be, “Please check your e-mails more often.” We demonstrate how being specific will get you specific results and how general things will get your general results.

Check Back and Edit

We discuss the need to edit. Even if you spent a lot of time writing up the basics in your template, it doesn’t mean that your report is perfect, and you don’t need to edit it anymore. This is the final part of the report writing process where you have to cut away everything that does not serve the purpose of your report, which you should have very clearly established by now. Be ruthless; delete everything that doesn’t have anything to do with the point of why you wrote the report. If some sentences or words you wrote only have slight relevance, but not actual, urgent relevance to the purpose of your report, delete it. You would not have time to read about how another employee feels about the human resource reallocation; you would probably rather read about how the collective staff feels about the human resource reallocation after a length staff poll. A good strategy to help edit your report is to read it out loud. Yes, read it out loud! If your own writing bores you or sounds unprofessional, imagine how it might sound if you had sent it as it was. It is much easier to catch mistakes when you place yourself in the shoes of whomever you are about to send it to. A good example of this might be, say, an employee named Yvonne, who wants to report about the financial records made in the last quarter. The purpose of the report is an objective reporting of the numbers made in the company’s businesses last quarter. Yvonne’s letter does not contain any anecdotal evidence, or first-hand accounts, just the various sales, transactions, overhead expenses, and other miscellaneous finances involved in the company’s efforts in the last quarter. This is an example of a business report that is straight to the point, and edited to fit the purpose it was meant for. This is only possible with some time spent on writing and editing the business report specifically to fit the purpose.