Project notes summary view

We have been trying to reproduce a function from our in-house project tracking/mgt homebrewed software, and one of the big gotchyas we're running into is a way to give a quick summary of all projects' current status, or even the ones updated in the last week.

Not the task-level status, but even say a Note that's called Summary or EOW Status etc that could be used in a report view so that as folks are traveling around they can get a quick glance as to what's on time, and an asynchronous ability to help assure the owner and managers that everything's taken care of.

There's a quick work-around of using the Description field and listing all projects, but that's just a bad kludge. A different Summary report of By Project with the hours billed/estimated, hours added this week, tasks overdue, and a newer text based status update field would be huge, and I think help a lot of folks in keeping an accurate summary of where a project is and not having to read through a dozen task descriptions and notes as well.