How to Create a Quarterly Report in Google Sheets

Putting together a quarterly report can feel like revisiting every spreadsheet you’ve touched for the last three months. It’s a process often defined by wrangling CSVs, fixing broken formulas, and trying to shape a mountain of raw data into a handful of meaningful insights. This guide will walk you through building a dynamic and useful quarterly report in Google Sheets, focusing on turning your data into clear actions instead of just a summary of what already happened.

Before You Build: Laying the Foundation for Your Report

Jumping straight into formulas and charts is a recipe for frustration. A great report starts with a clear plan. Before you open a new Sheet, take a few minutes to think through these foundational elements. It will save you hours of rework later.

Define Your Audience and Key Questions

Who is this report for? Your answer changes everything. A report for the marketing team will look very different from one for your CEO or board of directors.

For Leadership (CEO, Board): They need a high-level overview. They care about bottom-line results like revenue, customer acquisition cost (CAC), and overall growth trends. Their key question is, "Are we hitting our business goals?"
For Your Team (Marketing, Sales): They need granular detail to optimize their work. They'll want to see channel performance, campaign ROI, conversion rates by source, and sales cycle velocity. Their key question is, "What's working, what isn't, and what should we do next quarter?"
For Clients (if you're an agency): They want to see the value you're providing. Focus on metrics tied directly to the goals you set with them, highlighting clear wins and progress. Their key question is, "Is our investment paying off?"

Once you know your audience, list 3-5 high-priority questions your report absolutely must answer. This will be your North Star.

Choose Your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

With your key questions defined, you can now select the KPIs that will answer them. Resist the urge to include every metric you can find. A report with 50 charts is just noise, a report with 5-10 focused KPIs tells a story.

Here are some examples based on different teams:

Marketing: Website Sessions, Leads Generated (or MQLs), Conversion Rate, Cost Per Lead, Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC).
Sales: New Deals Created, Win Rate, Average Deal Size, Sales Cycle Length, Quota Attainment.
E-commerce/Shopify: Total Revenue, Average Order Value (AOV), Customer Lifetime Value (LTV), Conversion Rate by Traffic Source, Top Selling Products.

Choose the KPIs that directly reflect an ability to make a decision. "Website Sessions" is a starting point, but "Website Sessions from Organic Search that Converted to a Lead" is a metric you can act on.

Gather and Organize Your Data Sources

Here’s where the manual work usually kicks in. You need to pull data from everywhere it lives. The Monday morning ritual for many teams involves downloading CSVs from a dozen different platforms:

Google Analytics: for website traffic, user behavior, and conversions.
Your Ad Platforms: like Google Ads and Meta (Facebook) Ads for spend, impressions, clicks, and conversions.
Your CRM: like HubSpot or Salesforce for lead and deal data.
Your E-commerce Platform: like Shopify for sales, customer, and product data.
Your Email Platform: like Klaviyo or Mailchimp for email performance.

Create a simple folder and gather all your raw data exports for the quarter. Consistency is key - make sure your date ranges align across all platforms before you hit export.

Step-by-Step: Building Your Quarterly Report in Google Sheets

With your plan set and your raw data collected, it's time to build. We'll set up our sheet in a way that’s scalable and easy to update next quarter.

Step 1: Set Up Your Workspace

Open a new Google Sheet. Best practice is to separate your raw data, analysis, and dashboard. Create three tabs at the bottom:

Raw Data - GA: This is where you'll paste your Google Analytics export.
Raw Data - Ads: For your combined ad platform data. Add more tabs as needed for each clean source.
Dashboard: This will be your clean, presentable report. It should only contain charts and summaries, not raw data tables.

This structure prevents you from accidentally overwriting a formula in your raw data and keeps your final dashboard clean and professional.

Step 2: Clean and Prepare Your Data

Raw data is rarely ready for analysis. Paste your exports into the appropriate "Raw Data" tabs and do a quick cleanup pass. Look for things like:

Inconsistent Naming: "Facebook," "facebook.com," and "Meta" might all appear as sources. Use Find and Replace to standardize them.
Extra Spaces: The TRIM function is great for removing leading or trailing spaces that can break your formulas. TRIM(A2)
Date Formatting: Ensure all your date columns are formatted as dates (Format -> Number -> Date).

Step 3: Create Your Analysis & Dashboard Tab

Navigate to your "Dashboard" tab. This is where we'll use formulas to pull summarized data from your "Raw Data" tabs and turn it into charts.

Step 4: Use Formulas To Summarize Your Data

Instead of manually calculating totals, let Google Sheets do the heavy lifting. Place your simple KPI summaries at the top of your dashboard for an at-a-glance view. Here are the most valuable formulas for building reports.

SUMIFS: Your Go-To for Conditional Summing

What it does: Sums numbers in a range that meet one or more criteria.

When to use: Calculating total revenue from a specific marketing channel, ad spend for a single campaign, or sales from a particular region.

Example: Let’s say your ads data is on the 'Raw Data - Ads' tab, with Campaign Names in Column A and Spend in Column C. You want to sum the spend for "Q2 Spring Sale Campaign".

=SUMIFS('Raw Data - Ads'!C:C, 'Raw Data - Ads'!A:A, "Q2 Spring Sale Campaign")

COUNTIFS: For Conditional Counting

What it does: Counts the number of cells that meet one or more criteria.

When to use: Counting how many leads came from Google Organic, the number of deals closed by a specific sales rep, or products sold over a certain price point.

Example: In your CRM data, you have lead sources in Column B and want to count how many came from "Organic Search".

=COUNTIFS('Raw Data - CRM'!B:B, "Organic Search")

PIVOT TABLES: For Fast, Drag-and-Drop Summaries

What it does: A pivot table is an interactive tool that lets you quickly summarize huge datasets without writing a single formula.

When to use: This is perfect when you want to quickly see the relationship between two data points, like breaking down revenue by product and by month, or seeing lead counts per source for each week of the quarter.

How to create one:

Select your data range in your 'Raw Data' tab.
Go to Insert -> Pivot Table.
Choose to place it in an "Existing sheet" and select a cell in a new "Analysis" tab.
Use the Pivot Table editor that appears on the right. Drag "Traffic Source" to 'Rows', and drag "Sessions" to 'Values' (summarized by SUM). Instantly, you have a table showing total sessions by source.

Use the tables generated by these formulas and pivot tables to fuel your charts.

Step 5: Visualize Your Insights with Charts

Numbers in a table are hard to interpret. Charts make trends and comparisons immediately obvious. Go to Insert -> Chart and choose the right visualization for your data.

Line Charts: For Trends Over Time

Use a line chart to show how a metric has changed across the quarter. This is perfect for visualizing weekly website traffic, leads generated per month, or revenue over the 13 weeks of the quarter.

Bar or Column Charts: For Comparisons

Use a bar or column chart to compare categories against each other. It’s the best way to show performance by marketing channel, sales rep performance leaderboard, or revenue by product category.

Pie Charts (Use with Caution): For Parts of a Whole

Pie charts show the composition of a single metric. They work well for visualizing the percentage of website traffic coming from each channel (Organic, Paid, Direct, etc.). Pro tip: avoid using them if you have more than 5-6 categories, as they become impossible to read. A doughnut chart is just a prettier pie chart.

Scorecards: For Single, Key Numbers

A scorecard chart is perfect for highlighting your main KPIs at the top of the report. Use it to display big numbers like "Total Quarterly Revenue," "Total Leads," or "Overall Conversion Rate."

Beyond the Numbers: Telling a Story with Your Data

A report with accurate formulas and nice charts is good. A report that tells a story and sparks action is great.

Add Context and Narrative

Don't just show a line chart of traffic going up. Add a text box next to it explaining why it went up. "Organic traffic grew 30% in May following the launch of our new blog series on X, which now accounts for two of our top five landing pages." This context is an insight, not just data.

Highlight Key Wins and Challenges

Structure your report with a few bullet points at the top of each section summarizing the key takeaways.

Wins: What went exceptionally well? Celebrate it. "Our new ad campaign exceeded its lead goal by 25% while staying under budget."
Challenges: Where did you fall short? Be honest. "While lead volume was high, our sales win rate for marketing-sourced deals decreased from 15% to 12%."
Learnings: What did you discover? "We learned that leads from LinkedIn convert at twice the rate of other channels, suggesting we should reallocate our budget."

Focus on Forward-Looking Goals

End your report by looking ahead. Based on the data from this quarter, what should the priorities be for the next one? The end of your report is the beginning of the next quarter’s strategy session. A great report doesn't just look backward, it illuminates the path forward.

Final Thoughts

Building a valuable quarterly report in Google Sheets comes down to thoughtful planning, using the right formulas to summarize data, and focusing on visualization and narrative to make your key points clear. By treating your report as a decision-making tool instead of a data archive, you create an invaluable asset for your whole team.

The manual data exports and spreadsheet wrangling we described is a universal pain point - it's exactly why we built Graphed. Instead of spending hours pulling CSVs and building reports from scratch every quarter, you can connect your data sources like Google Analytics, HubSpot, and Shopify once and have live, updating dashboards instantly. We use AI to let you build reports and ask questions in plain English, so you can go from data to actionable insights in seconds, not days.