What is a business report?

A business report is a written document that provides information, and sometimes analysis, to assist a business in making informed decisions. The main purpose of a business report is to make data that is relevant to the company, such as information regarding efficiency, competition, or procedures, easily available to everyone in the company. The report needs to make this data easy for the reader to understand. The best way to do that is to have clearly defined sections with labels and headings.

STRUCTURE OF A BUSINESS REPORT

Title Of The Report – This component includes the report’s title and the name of the writer. Apart from these things, the title can also have a date and the name of the organization for which the report has been prepared.

The cover also has these things but putting them in details in the title section is mandatory.

Table Of Contents – This section includes headings and subheadings of the primary text written. This is a very important portion of report writing. It helps your readers to reach desired sections in your report in a hassle-free manner.

Summary or Abstract – Here you basically provide the synopsis of the whole report’s primary text and you can also call it an informative summary.

Many times, it is referred as ‘executive summary’. You can also use descriptive summary which is a simple table of contents. The format is always decided by the organization.

Introduction – This is the most important section of the main text. The main text always includes three components – introduction, discussion, and conclusion.

Here, you introduce the main text of your report in the most intriguing a detailed manner so that all types of readers can get your point without much effort.

Discussion – In the discussion section, a report writer discusses the main story of the report. According to your reader’s convenience, you decide the order of the report’s results.

You can also do a result to theory comparison here along with the analysis, evaluation and interpretation of the data included.

Conclusion/Recommendation – You can present the summary of the discussion section here. Here, you mention your findings and recommend the elements to your readers as per your overall evaluation.

Appendix – In the appendix portion, you can attach the graphs, lists, survey and suchlike stuff that are related to your report and helps your readers to understand the report comprehensively.

Reference/Bibliography – You can cite your report’s references in this portion.