Spektrix allows you to set up access to reports in various ways, the simplest of which is to run them directly from the Reports section in Insights & Mailings.
There may be circumstances however where that isn’t practical, such as:
- If you want to run a report at regular intervals, and it’s time-intensive to manually run it each time
- If you want to provide access to reports for venue staff who don’t have the user permissions to get into Insights & Mailings
- If a partner company such as a promoter or producer wants reports about their shows
You can use the Report Schedules tool for all of these situations. A Report Schedule is a way of taking one or more reports and either automating them to be emailed out at a specific time, or allowing them to be run and downloaded at will by a specific set of users. Crucially, you can provide access to reports this way for people outside of your organisation.
In this article, we'll cover:
- How Report Schedules work
- Setting up a Report Schedule
- Setting up access to download reports
- The Partner Companies Interface
How Report Schedules work
There are two ways Report Schedules can be run: either as a schedule or on demand. Which one you choose will depend on what purpose your Schedule is going to serve.
Run as schedule
Choosing Run as schedule allows you to regularly deliver a report to members of your team, or external partners such as a promoters and producers, either with the file(s) attached to the email, or with a link included so they can be downloaded by the recipient
Run on demand
Choosing Run on demand allows you to give external partners permission to run a report on demand using the Partner Companies Interface
You can set each schedule to use one or both of these methods, and to include a range of different users.
If you're delivering a report to an external partner by email as a link, or have made it available to run on demand, you'll need to make sure the recipient can access it by creating a Spektrix user account which gives them access to download their report. See the section below on setting up access to download reports for more info.
Including more than one report
A single Report Schedule can contain just one Customer List or a number of Customer Lists – the schedule itself deals with how and when the reports are delivered. You then choose which reports to include and, if they're being delivered, who receives them.
This means you could, for example, create a single Report Schedule that's configured to run at 10am every day and which delivers three different reports to three different members of your team. Alternatively, you could create three individual Report Schedules, each configured to run at 10am every day, and each of which delivers one report to one member of your team.
Setting up a Report Schedule
Report Schedules can be set up in Insights & Mailings > Report Schedules > Report Schedules. You'll see any existing Report Schedules listed here and can search for a specific Schedule by name, or the report it contains. To create a new Schedule, click the Add button:
There are two pages for you to complete when creating a new Customer List Schedule – Basic Details and Reports.
Basic Details
- Name: give your Schedule a clear and descriptive name, e.g. Daily Reports
- Description: though this field is optional, we'd recommend completing it to make it clear to other members of your team what the purpose of this Schedule is, e.g. Financial reports for reconciliation
As explained above, the next two options determine how your Report Schedule is going to operate. Once you have chosen one or both of these options, you need to either fill in the rest of the Basic Details, or move onto the next page.
- Run on demand - if you only tick this option then you don’t need to fill in anything else on the Basic Details page.
- Run as schedule - if you tick this option then you need to fill in the remaining fields on the Basic Details page, even if you have also ticked Run on demand
- Run on demand: if you only tick this option then you don’t need to fill in anything else on the Basic Details page; hit Next to continue
- Run as schedule: if you tick this option then you need to fill in the remaining fields on the Basic Details page, even if you have also ticked Run on demand
- Run from: choose when you want the Schedule to become active. This defaults to the current day, but you can change it if you want the Schedule to start running on a particular date
- Run until: fill this in if you only want your Schedule to run for a specific period of time. Leave it blank if you want the Schedule to run indefinitely
- Occurs: choose the frequency at which the Schedule runs
- Recurs every: this changes depending on what you choose in the Occurs field
- Daily: choose whether you want to send a report every day (pick 1 day) or every few days (pick the number of days from the list)
- Monthly (specific day): choose which day of the month you want to send a report, and whether you want to send it every month or every few months
- Weekly: choose the day or days of the week that you want to send a report, and whether you want to send it every week or every few weeks
- Monthly: use this if you want to send reports on the same day of the month, e.g. on the first Monday of the month
- Daily frequency: pick the time that you want emails to send
- Runs before 08:00: pick this to ensure the report is in recipients’ inboxes before 8am
- Runs every: use this to send reports at regular intervals, such as every hour. You can also set start and end times for this frequency
- Runs once at: pick a specific hour at which you want a report to be sent
Once you have filled everything in, click Next to move through to the Reports page, where you can choose the specific report(s) you want to include.
Reports
Here you can choose which reports to include in the Schedule, regardless of whether you have set it to run as a schedule or on demand. You can add as many reports to a Schedule as you need, and set each report to send or be available on demand to different people.
Click Add Report to start the process of adding reports to your Schedule; you'll then be able to choose a report and who you would like it to be emailed to/who you want to have access to run it on demand:
You'll then see a new screen, much like the standard Report Explorer:
From here you can search for the report that you want to add, then click the green plus button next to it and choose which Criteria Set you want to use:
You can't create new Criteria Sets here, so you'll want to ensure you've made these in the Report Explorer ahead of time.
Once you've chosen your report and its Criteria Set, you then need to fill in a few details about who is going to have access to the report and how it will be delivered to them:
- Name: give the report a name. You don’t have to use the actual name of the report in Spektrix, so feel free to rename it if necessary. For example, you might want to rename the Payments & Activities report (detailed) to something like Yesterday's Sales
Both the Spektrix name and this name will appear in the Schedule, so you can clearly see what reports a Schedule contains.
- Email to: enter the email addresses of every person you want to have access to this report. If you want to include more than one email address, you can separate them with a comma
You'll need to add email addresses regardless of whether you’re running it on a schedule or on demand.
- Custom subject: the default subject line for emails is "Your report from {ClientName}"; if you want it to be anything different, fill that in here
- Deliver as: if you're running a report as a schedule, choose whether to attach the file to the email or to send a link instead. If the file is too large to be sent as an email it will automatically default to being sent as a link
- File format: choose which format you want the report to be delivered as, either as a PDF, a formatted Excel file, an XML, a CSV, or an unformatted Excel file
Once you have filled everything in, click Next to move through to the Criteria page. Here you can choose the specific criteria that you want the report to use:
The criteria you choose here will apply every time the report runs as part of this schedule, whether that’s in a scheduled email or when a user logs in and runs it on demand.
Click the Ok button to finish setting up that particular report. To add more reports to the schedule, just repeat the process beginning with the Add Report button:
If you need to go back and edit any of the reports in the schedule you can just click the blue pencil icon next to the report’s name, or click the red cross icon to delete a report from the schedule.
Choose a criteria set based on criteria shared by all the Events to avoid having to edit the schedules frequently. For example, use an Event Attribute to connect all Events, then use that Attribute as your criteria (along with whether the Event's status is set to live, if you wanted to exclude archived Events). You could then add new Events to your system and, as long as you add the right Event Attribute, know that they will automatically be included in the report being delivered as part of this Schedule. You can learn more about using Attributes in reports in our article here.
Setting up access to download reports
Whether you're sending reports to be received via a download link in an email or through the Partner Companies Interface on demand, the recipient needs to be able to log in to Spektrix. Existing users set up with access to Spektrix will just need a specific user role added to their User Account, while anyone outside of your organisation can be set up with a login that only grants them access to their reports (as well as any Customer Lists set up to be accessed on demand using Customer List Schedules).
Existing Spektrix users
To make sure an existing Spektrix user can download reports from either a link or the Partner Companies Interface, you'll need to amend their User Account in the Settings Interface > Users > User Accounts. Click on the relevant user's name, then scroll down to the Roles section and make sure they have the Collect Report user role ticked. Click the Save User Account button; that user will now be able to download Customer Lists.
Users from outside your organisation
External users need a specific type of User Account to be able to log in and download their Customer Lists. The quickest way of setting this up to head to Insights & Mailings > Customer List Schedules > Users. Here you'll see a list of all the current User Accounts on your Spektrix. Scroll down and click the Add button on the bottom left-hand side to easily set up a new User Account which will only give that user the Collect Reports user role:
Fill in the details, set a password, and then tell that person what their password is in person – you should never write down or email passwords! If someone forgets their password, you can click on the Change Password link next to their name in the list.
The Partner Companies Interface
Reports set to run on demand are accessed via the Partner Companies Interface. This is a section of Spektrix which is separate from the main system, that's designed to be used by people who are not Spektrix users.
The URL for the Partner Companies Interface is:
https://system.spektrix.com/your venue name/client/partner-companies
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:
Anyone following that URL will see a login screen, in exactly the same way you do when you log into Spektrix:
Users should log in with their User Name and Password as normal; existing Spektrix users can use their normal login details, as long as you’ve made sure they have the Collect Reports user role.
Once they're logged in any reports which have been made available on demand to that user will show up in a list under the Reports tab. To run a report, they'll just need to click the Run button:
A note on running reports in the Partner Companies Interface
When you make a report available to be run on demand, you'll set the specific criteria that it’s being run on in exactly the same way as you would when scheduling it to be sent by email. That means your partner companies or third party users can’t customise their reports – they can only run them using the criteria that you have selected, and using the specific output method you have chosen (e.g. PDF, unformatted Excel).
You'll need to make this clear to anyone running reports on demand, so that they are aware of what they can and can’t do. You'll 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.