If you run client projects, you send status reports, and if you are like most agencies you have rebuilt the same one from scratch more times than you can count. This is a clean client project status report template you can copy, along with what belongs in each section and how often to send it. It works for a weekly email, a shared doc, or a slide, and it is deliberately short, because a client report nobody reads is worse than no report at all.
What a client status report is for
A client status report answers three questions the client actually has: whether their project is on track, what happened this week, and whether there is anything they need to worry about or act on. Everything else is optional. The mistake most reports make is burying those three answers under a wall of task-level detail the client did not ask for and will not read. Keep the report about outcomes and decisions, not activity.
What to include
A good client status report has six parts, in this order, because the order is the point. Lead with the answer, then support it.
Overall status. One line, up top: on track, at risk, or off track. This is the first thing the client wants and it should be the first thing they see. If you use a colour rating, this is your RAG status.
Summary. Two or three sentences in plain language. Where the project stands overall and the single most important thing to know this period.
Done this period. The outcomes completed since the last report. Not every task, just the things that moved the project forward and that the client cares about.
Coming next. What happens before the next report. This sets expectations and quietly shows momentum.
Risks and blockers. The honest part. Anything that could push the timeline, cost, or scope, and what you are doing about it. Do not hide this at the bottom or leave it out on a bad week. Clients forgive problems they heard about early and remember the ones they found out about late.
Needs from you. Anything waiting on the client: a decision, an approval, an asset, a payment. Make it a short, explicit list with dates, because client delay is one of the most common reasons work stalls.
The template
Copy this and fill it in.
PROJECT: [Project name]
CLIENT: [Client name]
PERIOD: [Week ending / month]
OVERALL STATUS: On track / At risk / Off track
SUMMARY
[2 to 3 sentences: where the project stands and the one thing to know.]
DONE THIS PERIOD
- [Outcome]
- [Outcome]
COMING NEXT
- [What happens before the next update]
- [What happens before the next update]
RISKS AND BLOCKERS
- [Risk or blocker]: [what we are doing about it]
NEEDS FROM YOU
- [Decision / approval / asset], needed by [date]
NEXT UPDATE: [date]
How often to send it
For most client work, weekly is the right rhythm. It is frequent enough that nothing festers for long and rare enough that it does not become noise. Move to twice weekly only near a launch or through a rough patch, and monthly only for slow, long-running retainers. Whatever cadence you pick, keep it, because a predictable update is one the client stops chasing you for.
Make it honest, and make it fast
Two habits separate a report clients trust from one they learn to skim. First, be straight about risk. The temptation on a busy week is to soften the slipping thing or leave it out, but a report that only ever says fine trains the client to not believe it. Second, keep it short. If it takes you an hour to write, it takes them too long to read.
The catch with writing these by hand
Here is the quiet problem with any template, including this one. It is still something a person has to sit down and fill in, usually late on a Friday, by reading the current state off your project tool and retyping it in nicer words. Every fact in the report already exists in the tool you used to do the work. The report is that information, copied out by hand.
That is the part worth removing. SRP generates a client-facing view of a project automatically from the work itself, the status, what is on track and at risk, the milestones and shared files, drawn from the real state of the project and updated whenever the client looks, without anyone rewriting it every week. We wrote about why that manual update is such a tax, and how to stop paying it, in the status email that writes itself. Use the template above today, and when the retyping starts to add up, let the work be the report instead.