How do I get useful reports out of Asana for my agency?

What is Asana, and what does reporting mean inside it?

Asana is a project and work management platform where teams organize work into projects made up of tasks, with portfolios available to group related projects together. Reporting in Asana means two main things: project-level dashboards showing progress and status, and (on higher plans) portfolio-level dashboards that roll several projects into one combined view, which is the piece agencies running multiple clients actually need.

What Asana plan do I need for real agency reporting?

Confirmed live from Asana's pricing page in October 2026, reporting capability is split clearly by plan:

• Personal (free, up to 2 users): basic task management only, no meaningful reporting.
• Starter ($10.99 a user a month, billed annually): project dashboards, CSV/PDF export, custom fields and status updates. This covers single-project reporting reasonably well.
• Advanced ($24.99 a user a month, billed annually): adds unlimited portfolios, portfolio dashboards, a portfolio summary report with PDF export, chart customization, universal reporting across projects, and integrations with Salesforce, Tableau and Power BI.
• Enterprise (custom pricing): adds governance and compliance reporting on top of Advanced.

For an agency running one project per client, this is the gap that matters most: Starter can report on each client project individually, but combining them into one owner-level view across every client requires Advanced's portfolios, which is a meaningful jump in per-seat cost (more than double Starter's price) just to unlock that one capability. Agencies deciding between tools can also read Asana against Monday for retainer work.

Run the actual numbers for a small team: a 6-person agency on Starter pays $65.94 a month (6 seats at $10.99, billed annually) and can see each client project's dashboard individually, but has to click into each one separately to check status across the client base. The same team on Advanced pays $149.94 a month, an extra $84 a month, and gets one portfolio view showing every client project's status side by side, plus the universal reporting and PDF-exportable summary that make a monthly internal review genuinely fast rather than a project-by-project crawl. For an owner who checks client status daily, that extra $84 a month usually buys back real time within the first month.

What Asana's dashboards actually show

At the project level, dashboards show task status breakdowns, progress toward completion, and whatever custom fields you've set up (priority, client, budget category, for example). At the portfolio level (Advanced and up), you get the same kind of view rolled up across every project in the portfolio, plus a PDF-exportable summary report, which is genuinely useful for a monthly "here's where every client stands" internal review.

What it doesn't show, at any plan tier: time tracked against tasks (Asana has no native time tracking, so this needs a separate integration), and anything related to billing, cost or margin, since Asana has no concept of your rates or retainer values built in.

Custom fields are worth calling out specifically, because they're the main way agencies make Asana's otherwise generic dashboards feel client-specific. Adding a "Client" custom field across every project, or a "Retainer category" field tagging each task against the type of work it falls under, means dashboard charts can be grouped by those fields rather than just by status or assignee. This is the single highest-leverage setup step for agency reporting in Asana: a well-structured custom field is often the difference between a dashboard that shows generic task counts and one that actually answers "how is this specific client's work breaking down this month."

Exporting Asana data to Excel and Power BI

CSV and PDF export is available from the Starter plan up, covering the basic case of pulling task data into a spreadsheet. The native Power BI integration, confirmed to exist on Asana's Advanced plan, is the more useful path for an agency that wants an automated, recurring report rather than a manual monthly export, since it can refresh on a schedule rather than requiring someone to re-export by hand each time.

Filling the time tracking and profit gap

Because Asana has no native time tracking or billing logic, agencies that want to see margin per client typically add one of two things: a time tracking integration (several connect directly to Asana) that logs hours against tasks, or a separate step where Asana's task and project data feeds into a broader owner dashboard alongside time and billing data from wherever those actually live. Either way, the margin calculation itself happens outside Asana, using Asana's project data as one input among several.

A simple reporting template worth building

For the portfolio-level monthly review most agency owners actually want: one row per client showing project status (on track, at risk, delayed), tasks completed this period against the plan, and (pulled in separately) hours used against that client's retainer or budget. Asana's portfolio dashboard covers the first two columns natively on Advanced. The third needs to come from wherever your time tracking actually lives.

A workable version of that review, concretely: a weekly recurring task assigned to whoever owns client reporting, with a checklist linking to the portfolio dashboard (for status), the time tracking integration's own report (for hours), and a short note field for anything a chart alone won't explain, a client being unhappy despite good numbers, or a retainer running hot because of an unusually large one-off request that month. The dashboards do the number-pulling; the weekly habit of actually looking at them together is what turns that into a real early-warning system instead of a report nobody opens until a client complains.

Is Asana itself ever the client-facing report?

Some agencies share a read-only view of a specific Asana project or portfolio directly with a client, rather than building a separate summary. This can work for clients who are comfortable in a tool like Asana and want visibility into granular task-level progress, but it comes with the same tradeoff every project tool shares when exposed directly to clients: the client sees internal task names, comments and workflow details that weren't written with them as the audience, and there's no simplified, plain-language summary layer unless you build one manually inside the project itself. For most agencies, a separate client-facing summary, whether that's an exported report, a connected reporting tool, or a client portal, ends up being the cleaner choice than Asana access directly.

How I'd approach this

If you're running a handful of client projects and mainly need status visibility, Starter covers that well and I wouldn't tell you to upgrade just for reporting. Once you're managing enough clients that one combined view across all of them matters, Advanced's portfolios are worth the jump. Where it's worth building something separate is the margin question specifically: Asana will never tell you whether a client is actually profitable, because it was never built to know your billing rates, and that number usually needs to live in a dashboard that combines Asana's project data with your actual time and billing figures. If the Advanced price looks steep for your team size, how ClickUp handles reporting for agencies is worth a side-by-side look. For the other common option, see what monday.com reports can and cannot do.

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