Blog · October 7, 2026

5 charts every monthly report needs (and 3 it doesn’t)

Good report charts answer one question each. These five cover most monthly reports:

1. Trend line by week or month. The single most useful chart: is it going up or down?
2. Horizontal bar chart of the top 10. Category labels stay readable, and the biggest group is obvious.
3. Biggest changes table. “From → to” for the groups that moved most since last period.
4. Day-of-week or hour-of-day columns. For anything with timestamps — staffing decisions live here.
5. Scatter plot when two measures move together, like discount and margin.

Skip these

Pie charts with more than three slices, 3D anything, and dual-axis charts that make two unrelated lines look related.