How Do I Schedule a Report?

How Do I Schedule a Report?

Another entry in our 'Basics' series, this article will cover how to setup a Scheduled Report in Report Toaster. 

Note - You must be on a paid plan of Report Toaster to have access to this feature. You can check out our app listing for more information on our various plans.

For instance, suppose I was looking to setup a report that automatically gets emailed to me every week to tell me what inventory we have in stock. Let's start with our Inventory Value report like so: 



Scheduling a Report

Once I've found the report I'm looking for, it's time to schedule the report. Start off by clicking the 3 button dropdown and selecting 'Schedule' like so: 



This then brings up a window where you can select your various options: 



Lets look at each of these in turn: 
  1. Name. What you want the report to be called. This is simply for your internal reference, so when you lookup the report again in the Scheduled Reports section (below), you'll remember which report is which. 
  2. Schedule every: How often you want the report to be delivered (by default, this is set to one week). You can change the number and the interval (hours, days, weeks, or months). 
  3. Start at: When you want the report to first run. Here you can select a date and time, so for example, I could choose 4pm today, and it would send it to me every Wednesday at 4pm. 
  4. End at: When you want the reports to stop running. So if I wanted 1 a week for the next month, I could choose a Wednesday a month from now as the end date. If I wanted the reports to keep delivering indefinitely, I can simply leave this field blank. 
  5. Recipients: If I want the report to have a recipient, I can select it here. We'll discuss this in more detail in the Recipients section below. 
  6. Format: The chosen file format for my report, whether it is CSV, JSON or PDF.
  7. Skip Empty Reports: If a report is blank (has no data), should it skip sending anything? (e.g. Suppose I was running a weekly report for sales of a specific item, and no items sold that week, should the system send my recipient an empty file or not?). 
  8. (CSV Only) Include Headers: If the report is a CSV file, do I want column headers on the report? Generally speaking the answer is yes, but sometimes you might just want the raw data (e.g. if you're importing it into another service). 
When you're done setting this up, it should look something like this: 



The Scheduled Report will run off whatever version you have saved to your My Reports (or whatever the default template is, if you're scheduling a standard report). 
This means that if you make changes to a saved My Report (and save the report again with the same name, so it overwrites the original), these changes will be reflected in the Scheduled Report whenever it next runs. 

Recipients

As mentioned above, we can choose a Recipient for this report to go to.

Recipients are entirely optional (you can have the system create a report each week and send it to nobody if you just need a regular snapshot of the report for your own use). But let's look at how we can set one up. 

Under Recipients, click the dropdown arrow on the right of the window. That pulls up this window: 



If we had any pre-existing recipients, they would appear here as an option (which you'll see in a moment). But for now, let's create our first recipient by clicking 'Create new recipient'. 



Here we can fill out the following information: 
  1. Name. The name of the person who is receiving the report. Like the name of the report, this is mostly for internal reference so you can distinguish recipients from one another. 
  2. Email(s). The email address(s) of the intended recipient if you want the report to be emailed to them. This field is entirely optional 
  3. SMS number(s). The mobile phone number(s) of the intended recipient if you want the report to be sent via SMS. This field is entirely optional. 
  4. Add Rest Endpoint. The URL Rest Endpoint of the intended recipient. This field is entirely optional. 
Note that if you fill out an Email for your recipient, (above), a toggle will appear for Create attachment:



Turning this toggle on will send your scheduled report as an attachment in the email. Otherwise, it will be available via a clickable link in the body of the email. 

Once you're done, click Ok and the recipient should be available for selection like so: 



Checking on a Scheduled Report 

If I want to check on the status of a Scheduled Report or make any adjustments, I can go to the Scheduled Report section via the menu like so: 



Here we can see the report I just created, with the details specified in the fields filled out above.
  1. If I want to make any edits to this report, I can click the pencil icon (right). This then brings up the same editor window as we saw in the previous screenshots.
  2. To delete a Scheduled Report, you can click the trash can icon (right) and click Ok on the subsequent dialog box. 
  3. You can add/remove any columns from this report by clicking the grid icon (top right). This brings up the columns menu, and you can drag/drop any you don't want to see in this view. Generally, most columns are on by default. 
  4. Finally, on the top right I can click the file icon (top right) to download a list of Scheduled reports. 
Over in the recipients tab, we can see all my existing recipients like so: 



 Most of the functions on this screen are identical to the previous Scheduled Report screen. However, you can also add a new recipient from this screen by clicking the Plus icon (top right). This is a good way to add a recipient in even if you have yet to Schedule a report for them. 

Clicking this button pulls up the same Recipient screen as in the Recipients section (above). 

Finally, on the History tab, we can see the history of all our Scheduled Report activity: 



Now obviously, any reports we schedule will only appear here after they have been sent.  

From this menu, we can see any reports we had previously scheduled, including when the report was created.


Scheduled Reports are stored in History for up to 30 days.
For reports dating earlier than this date, we recommend retrieving them from your email (assuming a recipient was setup) or recreating the report in the app with the appropriate date range. 

**UPDATE - As of 2/20/2024, we have changed this History to keep up to 1 year of Scheduled Report data.
This change will only apply on an ongoing basis (so won't affect any of the History logged before this time), but should provide a more extensive log for users in the future.

We can download a CSV copy of any of these reports by clicking the cloud icon under 'download'. 

Finally, we can click 'deliveries' to see the details of any prior deliveries of this report. This pulls up the following window: 

 

This is a useful thing to be able to check if you want to check if a report was successfully sent or not to each of your recipients. 

And really, that's all there is to it! 

For a more detailed explanation on this feature, check out our video here.
For issues with Scheduled Reports or to resolve a problem, check out our troubleshooting guide here.

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