Scheduling reports and Customer Lists using Report Schedules and Customer List Schedules is a great way of saving yourself time by automating the process of sending these files to whoever needs them, especially external companies such as promoters or producers. You can even set these recipients up with a Spektrix login to collect their Customer Lists, or reports that are too big to send as PDF attachments. But what if someone wants to be able to run a report or Customer List on an ad-hoc basis?
The Partner Companies Interface allows you to give non-Spektrix users – that is, anyone who doesn't have an existing Spektrix login, whether that's someone from a different part of your organisation, or from an entirely different one – the ability to run some or all of the reports and Customer Lists that you have scheduled for them on demand.
NOTE: despite the similar names, Partner Companies are not fundamentally linked to the Partner Companies Interface. It's good practice to set up Spektrix accounts with the Collect Report user role for anyone at your Partner Companies who you want to share data with, so that they can log into the Partner Companies Interface and download their data on demand, but the two features aren’t automatically linked. For example, it's entirely possible to create users with the Collect Report user role without having any Partner Companies set up.
Setting up a Customer List Schedule
The Partner Companies Interface works in essentially the same way as scheduled reports or Customer Lists – if you’re not familiar with those, you can find more details in the following articles:
These articles go through how to set up Report Schedules and Customer List Schedules, so we haven’t repeated that information here – instead this article only touches upon the elements specific to the Partner Companies Interface.
Basic Details
When you create either a Report Schedule or a Customer List Schedule you'll see two check boxes: allowing you to choose whether they can be Run on demand (which adds the Schedule to the Partner Companies Interface) or Run as schedule. You need to choose at least one of these options for your Schedule to work, but you can pick both if you want to enable both options:
- Run on demand: tick this option if you want non-Spektrix users to be able to log in and run the report or Customer List themselves from the Partner Companies Interface
- Run as schedule: choose this option if you still want to schedule your report or Customer List to send automatically; selecting this allows you to edit the scheduling fields
On the following page, make sure you fill in the email address of each person that you’d like to be able to download the report or Customer List. If you want to add multiple addresses, make sure you separate them with a comma between each one:
WARNING: When adding in the email address for users who view the reports, make sure this exactly matches the email address of their Spektrix User Account. This is case sensitive.
The Report Schedule will not identify them as the same if there are any differences in capitalisation.
Choosing criteria sets
When you make a report or Customer List available to be run on demand, you have to set the specific criteria that it will run on (or, in the case of Customer Lists, the segments it uses), and the specific file format it will output as (i.e. PDF or CSV).
Recipients can’t customise their reports or Customer Lists, they can only run them using the criteria that you have selected, and output them in the file format you have chosen. You'll need to make this clear to users so that they're aware of what they can and can’t do.
You probably also want to think carefully about the date metrics that you're using – remember, for instance, that the ‘Last Week' metric looks at the previous calendar week, not the previous seven days.
Running reports and downloading Customer Lists
In order to access the Partner Companies Interface, users need to have the Collect Report user role. Anyone with this user role will have access – meaning you can give this user role to uses who already have access to Spektrix (your box office team, for example), but can also set up non-Spektrix users with a login that only has the Collect Report user role. This way they'll be able to access the Partner Companies Interface, but won't have access to the rest of the system.
If you need to set up a user with just the Collect Report user role you can do it in two places:
- In the Settings Interface under Users > User Roles, making sure you only select Collect Report from the list of user roles
- In Insights & Mailings under either Report Schedules > Users or Customer List Schedules > Users, noting that this method only allows you to create users with the Collect Report user role
Users with the Collect Report user role can log in to the Partner Companies Interface at the following address:
https://system.spektrix.com/your venue name/client/partner-companies
NOTE: if you're not sure what your client name is, you can easily find it by logging in to Spektrix and looking at the address bar at the top of your browser window:
From here they'll be able to see all of the reports and/or Customer Lists that they are entitled to run, split out over separate tabs for Report and Customer Lists:
To run a report or a Customer List, they can just click the Run button – the report or Customer List will then run based on the criteria set/segments you chose in the Schedule. While it runs, they'll see a spinning grey icon in the top-right corner of the screen, which will change to a green tick when it's ready to download. Hovering the cursor over it will show the name of the report or Customer List; the file name can then be clicked to download it:
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You should now have everything you need in order to understand and use the Partner Companies Interface. If you have further questions, however, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with the Spektrix Support team.