Traktip: Scheduled Reports

It’s time for another Traktip!

This month, let’s look at using Scheduled Reports to deliver your reports automatically via email!  

Do you frequently run the same report? Are you responsible for sending reports to management? Don’t manually run the same report every week, schedule it!

Both Saved Searches and Report Writer Reports can be set to run on a schedule you determine and delivered automatically by email to whomever you choose. So no more logging in to manually run the same report every day, every week, or every month, before exporting and emailing it to your recipients.

Set Up and Delivery

It’s easy to set up a scheduled report to run once your report or saved search is created:

1. Navigate to: Reports in the left menu > Scheduled Reports in the right quick menu > Add.
2. Enter a name for your Scheduled Report.
3. Select what Report Type you want. This selection determines the input criteria for the report.
   1. Saved Search is a type of report that is created from the Search Issues screen.
   2. Report Writer Report is a type of report that is generated from Report Writer.
4. Choose an Output Type.
5. Determine the Schedule for this scheduled report. There are many choices on this menu, but notably:
   1. If you choose Hourly, you can set the scheduled report to be run only during specific hours.
   2. If you choose Daily, you can set the scheduled report to run at a specific time.
   3. If you choose Weekly, you can set the scheduled report to be run only on specific days.
6. (Optional) Enter the End Date. You can choose to leave this blank, and the scheduled report delivery will recur indefinitely until this scheduled report is inactivated or removed.

Once your report is scheduled, then you can set up who should receive the report:

1. Edit the report
2. Click “Add Recipient” under the words Report Distribution
3. Add a user with an Issuetrak User ID (this user will get a filtered report if they’re not allowed to see all issues)

OR

3. Add an email address to send an unfiltered report to someone outside of your Issuetrak users

Setting up scheduled reports eliminates questions like “Did I run that report for John today?” This works especially well if you need to send the report to users that normally wouldn’t have access to run their own reports

Bonus Tip: Walking Reports

When creating your reports and saved searches, you can report on any date on the issues. If you set the search criteria for those date fields to one of the pre-determined date ranges like “this week,” “last week,” or “last month,” those values will move with you. Let’s say you run a search for every issue submitted last week. It will always pull the previous calendar week, regardless of the actual date. Saving this search would let you then schedule it to run automatically every Monday.

Creating scheduled reports makes it easy to automatically run reports and have them sent to multiple recipients without any manual interaction. Know that your boss is going to get a report at the same time every week, every month, or every day.

As always, if you have any questions or would like to see this in action via a quick demo, I’m happy to help!