Getting data out of Accudemia using our reports feature is easy enough, but it can be made even easier with the reports scheduler, which is especially handy if you have information you’ll need to pull on a regular basis. Support Specialist Nick Armstrong talked about the advantages and best practices of the reports scheduling feature during a recent Accudemia Tech Talk. If you want to see this process in action, watch the recording here, or read on for a summary!
When does scheduling beat pulling reports by hand? Five situations come up again and again:
- A center director who needs daily or weekly Session Assessment reports can have them arrive by email instead of requesting them from tutors.
- A daily Scheduled Appointments report can go to all tutors so each day’s schedule is in their inbox before their shift.
- A weekly report can tell instructors which of their students have been using the center.
- A monthly report keeps stakeholders such as VPs and committee members informed without anyone logging in.
- Scheduled reports share exactly the data a person needs without widening their permissions: a director can send tutors their daily Session Assessment results without granting access to all assessment data.
Almost all reports can be scheduled in Accudemia, meaning that instead of pulling them manually, you can schedule them to run and be emailed to you or another stakeholder at a predetermined time. This is accomplished in four simple steps:
- Choose your report. There are so many reports available to you as a user of Accudemia. These include a report showing all Tutoring Assessments for a given day, a list of scheduled appointments, and a report to show an instructor which of their students visited your center. All reports can be filtered in multiple ways, and pulled into multiple formats.
- Run a test report. It’s always a good idea to run the report manually at least once before scheduling it, to make sure it contains all of the data you want and is in the format that you expect. You may consider trying a few different reports before selecting which one to schedule, to see if you or your stakeholders like other report options better.
- Document the options that you’ve selected. Once you’ve decided which report you want and which options or filters you will need, you’ll want to make sure you can recreate the report if you ever need to change or re-run the schedule. We recommend documenting the name of the report and the filter in a safe place.
- Schedule the Report. Our reports scheduling tool will walk you easily through the process of scheduling your report, which will allow you to select the filters, the frequency the report will run on, and to whom the report will be sent.
Two tips from the session: use a predefined date range such as Last 7 Days, This Week, or Current Semester rather than fixed custom dates, so the schedule keeps running correctly forever; and when sending to a specific group of people, choose the Specific Email Addresses option and paste the addresses straight from an Excel spreadsheet.
After a report is scheduled, you can click on Reports from the main Accudemia menu and view all your scheduled reports at any time.
Scheduled reports are a really handy feature of Accudemia, and we hope this post encourages you to take advantage if you are not doing so already! If you have any questions, contact Support, and we hope to see you at the next Accudemia Tech Talk.
Check the page about our Monthly Accudemia Session to find out more about our next session and for more ideas about helping our students achieve success!
