“Hey, can you pull a quick report for the leadership team by this afternoon?”
And just like that, your already-packed day veers into the world of spreadsheets, hunting down turnaround times and job statuses. No one trained you for this. You're not a data analyst — you lead a team of designers and developers doing high-level creative work.
Yet here you are, making manual reports to prove your team’s value and stay ahead of leadership’s questions.
Sound familiar?
You're not alone. Reporting is one of the most consistently painful and under-supported parts of running a creative team. In this post, we’ll break down:
The top 2 reporting frustrations creative directors face
How to get ahead of them (even without JobSuite)
A free dashboard template to get you started
Let’s get into it.
One of the biggest headaches? Simply finding out what’s happening with the work.
You know the feeling — you’re walking into a review meeting or your Monday standup, and someone asks:
“What’s the status of the Q2 email campaign?”
“Did we ever finish those product videos for onboarding?”
And suddenly you’re pinging people in Slack, digging through Asana or Monday, maybe even scrolling back in email threads. It’s frustrating, inefficient, and makes you look like you’re out of the loop.
Most project tools are great for managing tasks but terrible at giving big-picture visibility. They weren’t built for reporting — they were built for doing.
Whether you use JobSuite or another system, the trick is to track the right metadata across jobs, then pull it into a summary report you can update weekly or monthly.
Start with these 5 fields:
Job name
Department or stakeholder
Assigned team member(s)
Start and completion date
Job type (email, video, landing page, etc.)
Put this into a simple dashboard. Filter it by date. Now you can answer 90% of leadership’s questions with a 30-second glance — instead of a 30-minute dig through task threads.
Let’s say you do find all the jobs.
Now you’re asked:
“How long are projects taking to complete?”
“What’s your team’s workload per week or month?”
“How many jobs are we doing for each department?”
This is where most creative leaders get stuck — not because they don’t care about data, but because they don’t know what metrics actually matter.
If your only reports are how many things were “done,” you’re missing the nuance leadership actually needs to support you.
Worse: when you don’t control the narrative, someone else will.
Start with turnaround time and job volume by department. These two simple metrics tell a powerful story:
How fast your team works
Where your resources are going
Whether certain departments are overloading the pipeline
If you want to go deeper, track job type trends to show how your team’s creative output is evolving. Are you doing more video? Less print? That’s strategic data, not just ops trivia.
✨ Pro Tip: Use formulas in Google Sheets or Excel to calculate average turnaround time (completion date minus request date), and charts to visualize trends.
Back to where we started.
It’s 2pm. You’re prepping for a campaign kickoff. Your boss messages you:
“Any chance you can send me a report on creative jobs completed YTD?”
Now you’re scrambling.
The work gets interrupted. Your energy gets drained. And that perfect kickoff? Out the window.
You don’t have ready-to-go reports that leadership can self-serve or access on a recurring basis.
Automate what you can, even with basic tools:
Create a dashboard view (in Sheets, Airtable, Notion — doesn’t matter)
Update it weekly or monthly with filters for recent work
Share the link with your stakeholders once and say: “This is always up to date.”
No more surprise requests. No more fire drills. You’ve built visibility into your workflow.
At JobSuite, we help teams centralize all this into visual dashboards. But if you’re not using JobSuite, you can still get started using the same ideas:
Centralize your data: Even if it’s just a shared Google Sheet
Track what matters: Turnaround time, job types, stakeholders
Make it visual: Use color coding, filters, charts
Update it on a rhythm: Weekly or monthly — consistency builds trust
Reporting doesn’t have to be perfect.
You just need:
Clear fields
Consistent inputs
A simple way to share the data
That’s what makes your creative team look credible and well-run. And honestly, it just makes your life less chaotic.
You’ve got enough on your plate. Make reporting one less thing that sucks the energy out of your week.
👀 Want help setting up your report?
Drop a comment or DM and I’ll send over the link to the template — or we’ll build one with you.