Oh, the eternal struggle of making clients care about numbers. I've found the same hybrid setup works best: a live dashboard for the nerds, a short monthly summary for the normals, and one section that actually answers "so what?"
The biggest mistake is treating reporting like a data-entry job. You can shove 14 charts from Looker Studio at them, but clients don't want a PhD in analytics - they want to know if they're winning, what we did about it, and what they need to sign off on next.
So yeah, separate the collection, the internal head-scratching, and the client-facing translation. I've been messing around with a tool that handles that last bit - taking my scrappy work notes and turning them into a report that doesn't look like I wrote it in a cab. But the principle holds no matter what: automate the boring stuff, then spend your brainpower on actual insight.
If you're just starting out, keep it simple. A dashboard plus an one-page narrative. If clients start asking smarter questions after reading it, you've done it right.
