How to Setup Alerts in Report Toaster
In this article, we'll look at one of the more underutilized features in Report Toaster - using Scheduled Reports to setup Alerts for your store!
What are Alerts?
Alerts are email notifications that can warn you of any changes in a key report.
The applications are very broad, but a few common use cases include things like:
- Letting you know if certain products are low stock/out of stock.
- Letting you know if products are missing certain details.
- Letting you know if items fall below a certain threshold on Days Available, based on Sales Velocity.
- Letting you know how well a certain sale is performing.
Note - Scheduled Reports are available on paid plans of Report Toaster. If you aren't signed up, follow these steps to upgrade your account.
The core idea here is that you use alerts so you don't have to keep checking on certain reports manually.
This can save you hours of time and money every week, especially if you can identify and solve issues before they become a problem!
Basically, Alerts give you only the information you need and only when you need it.
Let's look at how to set this up.
Creating the Report
First, we need to create the custom report that includes the things we care about.
For this example, we'll use the Low Stock Products report, found in the Inventory section:
Here you can see that the report shows any products in my store that have less than 10 units available
(I can adjust this threshold to anything I want via changing the filter).
Once I've customized the report in terms of filters, columns, dates, sorting etc, I just need to Save to My Reports for future use.
Setting Up Alerts
Next, we simply create a Scheduled Report.
First, the important thing here is to choose a frequency that works for you.
For most people this might be daily, but if it's something you expect to change often, then even an hourly frequency might be a good idea.
Basically, just think about how often you want the report to run. e.g. if it's daily, it will only check and send the report once per day.
This is fine for most use-cases, but probably a bad idea if you can't wait another 24 hours for something that missed the cutoff.
This is fine for most use-cases, but probably a bad idea if you can't wait another 24 hours for something that missed the cutoff.
The most crucial part of setting up an Alert is that we use the 'Skip Empty' feature.
Skip Empty ensures that the scheduled report will ONLY send if there's actually something to show in the report (i.e. it isn't blank or has no results).
For example, let's say I have a Low Stock Products report scheduled to send each day at 9.00am.
The skip empty feature ensures that the email only sends if there actually ARE any low-stock products, so you don't get flooded with daily emails when there are no results.
Finally, make sure the recipient(s) are the people who are most capable of taking action on those items in your store.
For example, if this is a low/out of stock product report, I want the alert to go to whoever reorders inventory.
Don't forget you can always have multiple recipients here. This is a good idea if you're managing staff and need to be kept in the loop for what's happening.
(or you just need redundancy in case somebody missed the message!)
Here's how the end result might look.
Click Save and then that's it, you're done!
Common Use Cases
Now that we understand how this works, let's take a look at setting up some alerts for some really common situations:
1.) Days Available <X
The Sales Velocity report that measures how fast items are selling, so let's say I want an alert whenever I have less than 30 days available of a particular SKU.
Perhaps I know it can take a month to reorder certain items from my supplier, or I just always want a good amount of inventory kept in stock?
First, we can go to the Sales Velocity report, and add a Metrics Filter to limit the results to only items between 0-30 days available:
Save this and schedule it following the process above.
This is a great way to avoid leaving money on the table - if you're always restocking items BEFORE they run out, you'll never miss out on crucial sales!
2.) Product Cleanup
This report tells me if I setup products in my store and forgot to include certain details.
(e.g. missing costs, missing images, missing skus, missing product type...)
Simply change the filter for Product Issues for the things we care about (e.g. here I just limited the results to those products missing a product type)
Note - all product issues will be displayed, but only products with the issue you filter on will be included in the report.
See below for other great reports to use in the exact same way:
3.) Sales Performance
There are lots of great examples here:
- Suppose I setup a particular discount code and I want to get notified when anybody uses it?
- Suppose I'm running a new ad campaign and want to see if it resulted in any sales?
- Suppose I just launched a new customizable product and want to be notified of any custom orders?
The principle is always the same. Filter the report to only the results you care about, Save it, and Schedule the Alert.
And then that's basically it!
If you need help setting up Alerts for your account then please contact us at support@cloudlab.com and we'll be happy to help you out.
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