Support Suite

The Reporting Engine has the ability to schedule the generation of any report.  The report is conveniently e-mailed to you in PDF form.  This is especially useful for reports that you need generated on a regular basis.  It saves you time and the need to remember generating the report on your own.  To set this up, first locate the Schedule button in the Reporting Engine.

Hit the button to open the Schedules screen.  Any previously defined schedules will be listed.  You can highlight and hit the Edit button to change them.  To add a new schedule, hit the Add button.

This brings up the Add Schedule screen.  First, define a name.  Next, pick the Schedule Type.  You can choose between Run Once, On Startup, and Recurrent.  Generally, you will want to pick Recurrent.  Then, you would set the Frequency.  You can choose between Daily, Weekly, and Monthly.  Choose a recurrence pattern.  For Daily, you can define it to recur a specific number of days.  For Weekly, you can choose to recur a specific number of weeks, and also choose which days of the week to run.  For Monthly, you can choose to recur a specific number of months on a specific day of the month.  You will also need to specify the time of day for the report to auto generate.  The schedule is highly customizable and gives you the option to accommodate many different possible scenarios.

When you are done setting your desired schedule, hit the Save button.  This will activate the Report Tasks in Schedule button.  Hit this button next.  The Report Task Referencing a Schedule screen will pop up.  This is basically where you add which reports you would like to generate, based on the schedule you previously defined.  You can add multiple reports to a single schedule.  Initially, there will be no reports in the list.  Hit the Add button to pick a report.

This brings up the Add Scheduled Report Task screen.  First, enter a name for the report.  The SQL Timeout default value should be fine, but can be increased so that large reports have a sufficient amount of time to generate.  You can choose the format of the generated report.  The options are PDF, Excel, CSV, & Text.  PDF is the default and generally the most portable.  The Schedule is automatically selected for you.  Define the Subject and Body of the e-mail that will deliver the report.

Pick the name of the existing report that you are generating from the Report dropdown.  Upon doing so, the report filters are brought up.  Choose the input parameters that should be used by default.  Normally, you choose the parameters manually when generating a report, but since we are automating this process, they must be predefined.  Once you choose the desired parameters, hit the Schedule button to transfer your selections to the Report Filters box.

Finally, you need to select which persons you want the report sent to.  Hit the Select Contacts to bring up the Select Contact screen.  You can search customer contacts (customers & vendors) or system users (internal staff members).  Locate the user from the search results list and hit the down arrow button to add the person to the report delivery list.  Hit Ok when you are done.

Now go ahead and hit the Save button on all your open windows to keep all your settings you just configured.  Your report will now automatically be generated and e-mailed as you defined it.