I am a consultant working in a distributed team, often remote from our client. I find the standup format to be very useful, often delivered via a daily email.

I am a consultant working in a distributed team, often remote from our client. I find the standup format to be very useful, often delivered via a daily email. While we use a formal issue tracker like Jira which handles approvals and estimates, from a project management perspective it's useful to have a summary email that is short enough for people to read and focused on business level issues. "Today I worked on this" / "Next I plan to work on that." This helps clients to see exactly what we are working on. It avoids miscommunication where we think they told us to prioritize something different, or they thought they told us to stop work on something, or they think we are finished with something and we are not. Having an email every day lets them tell us to stop work immediately if we are doing the wrong thing, avoiding surprise invoices the next month. It avoids them claiming that they didn't know that we were working on something. "Here are the problems I am having / things I need from you". This is very useful to keep track of delays caused by the client. This might be them needing to review and accept work, review specs, or pay their invoices. Issues stay on the report until they are resolved. It documents that we didn't get what we needed, so we can't be blamed for things being late.