Email Reports using Schedules

Introduction

Email report automation is provided in Bi4Cloud with Scheduled Emails.  You can choose to send various reports or dashboards from a workbook to various email addresses with selection of daily, weekly or monthly. This feature is useful when you need to provide information to people who do not have a Bi4Cloud account like your Sales Reps, Vendors, Suppliers, Division Managers and the like. 

This feature is only available where:

• Enterprise subscription; and
• User's Profile - is set to Reports Visualisation, Excel, Emailer see Add Users and User Access

Create an Email Schedule

Open the workbook that contains the reports you wish to email. Click the WorkBook tab and then click [Schedule Emails] button.

The Schedule Emails popup will display, to schedule a new email click the [+] button

Setup the schedule, the email addresses to send to and which reports you want to send. 

In the form below you can do the following

1. Enable or disable this schedule. Use the Clock button to show the next datetime the schule will run
2. Set the FIRST startdate tio run the schedule
3. Set the frequency Daily, Weekly, Monthly
   • Weekly allow you to select mutiple days of the week
   • Month has option to chose the days of the month or the first dayname of the month eg First Tuesday of the month.
   • The source email and do use  alist of emails you type in or to use a email address list and restrictions.
4. The Emails input takes a comma separated list of email addresses and there is a CC and A BCC list
5. The Tab label indicates which report tab will be sent and if the format is PDF Portrait (default), PDF Landscape or various Excel formats where Excel is possible. At times an Email Body format is available which will render the report inline text. This is made available for simple alerts and notifications but it has several limitations. See Using Email Body format in Schedule emails.
6.  Below the Tab label  the PDF Template can be chosen which contains user define report heading.  
7. Subject line can be entered.
8. You [ + Add ] additional tab reports using the button adjacent to the Attachments label

Once complete you can press Save and returns to the Schedule List. At the bottom of this screen are details about the highlighted schedule.

Pay particular attention to the features on the right. Control here allow you to disable the schedule, edit, delete and clone the schedule. You can show the next execution dates and you can send the email now or send the email to a test or proof user and you get a dialog box to enter that email address.

Why use Email Address vs Address Lists ?

In the animation below you see the the scheduled reports can be sent to one or more email addresses. This sends the same reports to each of these people. The address list slider opens access to previously setup address lists that contain recipients. This will send the scheduled reports to those recipients but as it does it filters the reports to the restrictions setup for those recipients. Your no longer need multiple versions of teh same reports. You need one version of a report and setup recipients with email addresses and restrictions to control what they are sent.

In detail two options exist for defining who receives the reports and what they are sent.

1. Option One : Use an Email Address. This will send the selected reports to one of more email addresses that you specify.
   • The reports are that are sent will be exactly the same for each email address in the list.
   • If a report requires different information for each specific receiver then your copy the reposter, filter for the restriction, save it and set to email.
   • Example 1: Each Sales Rep Weekly Aged Receivables report of their Customers on Monday to encourage collection. For each Sales Rep you will copy the report, set the Sales Rep name, save it and schedule the email.  
   • Example 2: Each Sales Rep Sales v Budget report on Friday so they can track quota and whether quotes have been processed. As above eahc reports is copied, filtered, saved and email setup.
   • The downside of this Option is the number of schedules  is multiplied by the Reports x Sales Reps So above two reports with 5 report is 10 schedules to maintain.
2. Option Two : Use Address Lists.  This will send the selected reports to an Adddress List of Recipients and will filter the reports based upon the restriction filters setup on the Recipient.
   • The Reports are filter based upon each Recipients restriction filters
   • Only one set of Reports needs to be setup and the resultant report output and emails can have compound and different outputs
   • The upside of this option is for the example from Option One above only two reports would need to be setup and the Address list processing will deal with filtering the restictions and the Sales Reps would be setup as Recipients.
   • See  Address List and Recipients for setup details