Obviously, the HT - VT stats are included on the quarterly, but should still be a monthly task on the ward level, as per CHI (CHI book 2: 9.5.4, and CHI book 2: 7.4.4) While the CHI doesn't require you to do this on MLS, most units probably do... If you do, then they are also provided to the stake monthly. Our stake still requires a separate HT report delivered monthly from each EQ & HP group to the stake through the High Council rep, including monthly goals and success stories, Prospective elder info, etc.
As far as attendance, our stake presidency doesn't require any additional reporting above the quarterly data. However, specific Stake organizations might. I think our Sunday School Pres. has a reporting policy, and I think the stake Primary still asks for an additional report from their ward leaders on children NOT attending any meetings. I have stakes in the past that required a similar "members not attending" monthly report of priesthood quorums, both aaronic and Melchizedek.
Our stake DOES enter the quarterly data into a separate spreadsheet for further processing, and breaks it down into wards and provides this report back to the ward, as described at this link to
the wiki:
Some wards and stakes find it helpful to copy the data from the Quarterly Report into a
spreadsheet. This allows you to create charts for each of the major statistics for more visual appeal and trend analysis.
Some examples of the kind of statistics that can be done from the raw data in the quarterly report....
(see the wiki for all of these additional statistics you can create without gathering any additional data)
As a side note, remember that
the quarterly report may not give you a true picture of your membership's habits, however, and a monthly report might.
Should a member that attends a quorum four times a year be counted as having the same attendance as a member that attends every week? The quarterly reporting methods allows those two individuals to be statistically identical, one that attends weekly, and one that attends four times a year. While that may be good enough for the needs that CHQ tracks, you need to ask if that is good enough for an elders quorum president, or the bishop, or the stake president?
To me there is no question: "That which we measure improves." I was EQ pres. when we moved from the monthly attendance to the quarterly attendance (counting last month of quarter only) for the report many years back. The message seemed to be, no more roles for the first two months of each quarter, so we didn't take it.
Our presidency felt an immediate drop in our understanding of the participation habits of our quorum, and after a few quarters, we unanimously voted to go back to keeping role monthly. As this had "opened our eyes," we even went further, and asked the secretary to provide the presidency with a running report of "members not attending monthly," which was far more insightful to us then "members attending at least once per quarter," kept on a spreadsheet, so we could look back and compare it to the months before.
If my bishop or stake pres. asked me to provide this to him, I wouldn't assume he was "micro-managing." I would assume he wanted me to learn to use such a report for my own presidencies analysis and benefit. Requiring it be turned in would not be as much for that leaders benefit as it would ensure that we had the info we needed in our own presidency.
A leader may use this to train new presidencies by requiring further processing of Home Teaching data. Looking deeper and processing the numbers is what makes this data useful. Do you ever list all prospective elders that were missed by HT'ers in a month? Or list the percentage of visits to households without Melchizedek priesthood in the home? Have you run a report of families NOT HOME TAUGHT and sorted it by how many months in a row they have been missed- this can be further processed in a spreadsheet to identify which of those really shouldn't get missed...ever!
When the CHI suggest clerks should look for trends and provide reports of things they find, this is exactly what it is taking about. "Lift the hood" of your quarterly reports, and take a peak inside, and check ALL those fluid levels, sure, but look for the leaks underneath that might highlight problems...and see what is really going on.
However, if you're just counting, and nobody is looking at the figures you gather, sure, you are wasting time. Sorry for the long post, but this is my experience, like you asked...