Tech Talk Tuesday Recap for 06/01/21: Using the report scheduler

2 June 2021

TECH TALK TUESDAY

Most users know that Accudemia contains many reports that display data in a wide variety of ways. In contrast, fewer are familiar with the scheduled reports feature. This feature allows our users to ensure reports go out regularly to stakeholders, without having to go in themselves to pull the reports every time.

Nick Armstrong, our Senior Technical Support Specialist, hosted this week’s Tech Talk Tuesday session.

He started by providing examples of times when scheduling reports can come in handy:

  • A center director who needs daily or weekly Session Assessment reports can schedule them to come to their inbox, rather than asking for them from the tutors.
  • The director can set up a daily Scheduled Appointment report that would go out to all their tutors so they are aware of their upcoming schedule for the day.
  • A weekly report to instructors can tell them which of their students have been taking advantage of the center.
  • A monthly report can be sent to stakeholders such as VP’s, committee members, and more keeping them informed.
  • Reports can also be a good way to get information to users without giving them excessive permissions. For example, a center director may wish to share daily Session Assessment reports with their tutors, and a scheduled report is the best way to provide this information without giving them access to all Session Assessment data.

Nick then walked attendees through the process of scheduling reports.
Here are some important tips that came up:

  • Start by finding the report you want to schedule. Accudemia has many different types of reports, so be sure to run several of them to see if the report has the data you are looking for with the available filters you need.  Once found, make note of the report, so you can pull that report later and schedule it.
  • For your scheduled report to run correctly, you’ll want to use a predefined range (e.g. “Last 7 days”, “This Week”, “This Month”, or “Current Semester”, etc.), not a custom range with specific dates so that the report can run in perpetuity.
  • When scheduling a report, once all your filters are set the way you want, click the “Schedule Report” button. You’ll be asked to give the report a title and verify how often it should run, what time of day, and the audience you want to send the report to. 
  • If you have a group of specific users you want to send it to, the easiest way to schedule the report to go to all of them is to select the “Specific Email Addresses” option and then paste the emails from an Excel spreadsheet.
  • Be sure to review your report before scheduling it to make sure all of your parameters are set the way you need them.
  • On the Scheduled Reports page (accessible via Reports → Scheduled Reports), you can view both the most recently ran scheduled reports and the next execution time for each Scheduled Report.

Scheduled Reports can save you SO much time, and can deliver you and your stakeholders a wide range of data. We were pleased to introduce and demo this function to our attendees, who said it gave them additional ideas for reporting in their areas. We hope it inspires you as well! Let us know in the comments below how you use scheduled reporting in your center.