Scheduling and sharing reports

TrakIT can send reports on a schedule, by email, to an FTP server or to another system’s web address, and let other users generate them when they need them. This guide follows a report from choosing its kind to the day it stops being sent: who receives it, who can see it, what TrakIT does at the scheduled hour, and where to look when a report did not arrive.

It is for report owners, and for the system administrators who keep an eye on all reports. The running example: your customer Example Shipping Co wants a list of its open containers every weekday at 07:00 its time (UTC+1), and your operations team wants the same list for every customer.

The menus you see depend on your role and on how your company has set TrakIT up. The paths on this page are those of the standard menu; see Navigating TrakIT.

1. Choose the kind of report

	Workflow report	Advanced report	Query report	Interactive report
Covers	The work orders of one workflow.	Work orders or jobs of any workflow, chosen by filters.	Whatever its database query returns.	Ready-made figures on operations, KPIs, finance and users.
Built by	You, from fields.	You, from fields and filters.	TrakIT Support writes the query; you schedule it.	Ready-made.
Sent on a schedule	Yes, per subscription.	Yes, per subscription.	Yes, one schedule per report.	No: run it on the page.
Delivery	Email.	Email, FTP or web API.	Email, FTP or API post.	Download to Excel.
Formats	Excel, CSV, HTML.	PDF form, CSV, HTML, Excel, text, JSON.	CSV, HTML, Excel, text, JSON.	Excel.
Fetched through the API	No.	Yes, per subscription.	Yes.	No.
Where	Reports > Workflow	Reports > Advanced	Reports > Query	Reports > Interactive

For the example, a workflow report with a customer subscription for Example Shipping Co and a user subscription for the team does the job, if all the work orders are in one workflow. If they span several workflows, use an advanced report. For data that no report field offers, ask TrakIT Support for a query report.

Interactive reports can’t be scheduled or shared as such: export them to Excel and send the file. They show each user only the workflows and companies they have access to, so two users can get different figures from the same report.

2. Build the report

Workflow report: select Create on Workflow Reports, choose the workflow, then add the fields.
Advanced report: select Create on Advanced Reports, then add the fields and at least one filter. Without a filter on the creation date, it only includes the work orders whose latest event is in the last 12 months.
Query report: select the TrakIT Support link below the Query reports list to ask for one. TrakIT Support writes the query, sets the report up and names its owner.

The user who creates a workflow or advanced report is its owner. Only the owner and system administrators can change a report, its subscriptions, its recipients and who has access to it. For a workflow or advanced report, choose the File History when you create it if you want TrakIT to keep copies of the files it generates.

3. Add a subscription and its schedule

A subscription is one way the report goes out: its format, its schedule, and its recipients or destination. A report can have many.

Kind	Subscriptions
Workflow report	A customer subscription sends one customer its own work orders; a user subscription sends your users all the open work orders of the workflow.
Advanced report	Subscriptions, each with its own filters on top of the report’s. One subscription can also be sent separately to up to 100 entities, each getting only its own work orders.
Query report	No subscriptions: the report itself has one schedule and delivery.

The schedule is set the same way everywhere:

Weekly, with the days, or Monthly, with the dates from 1 to 30.
At Hour(s): whole hours from 0 to 23, in UTC. Example Shipping Co is at UTC+1, so 07:00 its time is hour 6. The hour stays the same in UTC when your clocks change for summer time.
With no days or dates, the report is never sent on its own. You can still preview it or use Send Now.

Many reports at the same hour wait for each other in the queue. A system administrator can see the busy hours on the Report heatmap (Admin > SysAdmin Pages > Report Heatmap) and move some schedules.

4. Choose the delivery

Email goes to the subscription’s recipients. The file is attached, or with HTML in Email the report is in the email itself.
FTP saves the file on an FTP server that a system administrator has set up on the FTP tab of Integrations. Advanced and query reports only.
Web API (API Post on query reports) posts the file to another system’s web address. When you save, TrakIT posts a test file there and refuses the address if it is not accepted. Advanced and query reports only.

A query report sent by FTP or API post emails its recipients, if it has any, to say whether the upload worked.

5. Choose the recipients

For email delivery, open Recipients on the subscription (or on the query report) and add people under To:, Cc: or Bcc:. Each kind of recipient behaves differently:

Recipient	What happens
A TrakIT user	TrakIT uses the user’s current email address at each send, and leaves the user out while they are locked. They see the report on My Reports.
A user group	The email goes to the group’s address, its members or both, as set in its Email Recipients. Members who join or leave are followed automatically. An archived group reaches nobody.
An email address	For people who are not TrakIT users, such as a customer’s staff. An external user is added this way too.

For the example, add the operations team’s user group to the user subscription, rather than each person. Each user group’s page shows its owner how many reports send to it.

Entities’ own addresses come in two ways, and they do not behave the same:

On a workflow report, Add Customer as Recipient copies the customer’s General Emails into the new customer subscription’s recipients, once. If the customer’s addresses change later on its entity, change the recipients too.
On an advanced report, a subscription sent per entity reads each entity’s General, Finance or Management emails each time it is sent, so it always uses the current addresses.

To add the same recipients to several advanced report subscriptions, use Tasks > Add Recipients, with user groups written as [G-CODE].

An email subscription with no recipients is not sent: the queue shows No recipients to send to. Addresses on the Emails Excluded list are left out of every email.

Recipients can take themselves off:

A user removes a report sent to them by name or address on My Reports. A report received through a group can’t be removed this way: ask the owner.
Someone who is not a TrakIT user can follow the Unsubscribe link at the end of TrakIT’s standard email, within 7 days. Their address is then removed from the recipients of every report and added to the Emails Excluded list.

6. Decide who can see and generate the report

Receiving a report and being able to generate it are separate:

Who	Can
The owner	Change the report, preview and send every subscription, choose recipients and user access.
System administrators	The same, on every report, including inactive ones.
Users given access	Generate the subscription themselves, with Preview on the report or Download on My Reports. They can’t change it. On a query report, they can also change its parameters, for everyone.
Other users who can open the report	See how it is set up, and ask for access.
Recipients	Receive it. They need user access as well to download it whenever they like.

To give access, open User Access on the subscription (or the query report) and choose the user: see advanced report, workflow report or query report. A user who needs access can select Request Access instead: the owner gets an email with a Grant Access button, valid for 7 days.

A workflow or advanced report holds the same data for everyone who receives or generates it: its workflow and filters decide which work orders it lists, not the reader’s own access. A query report lists what its query returns: ask TrakIT Support whether it depends on who runs it. Check what a report contains before you add recipients or user access. Workflow reports open only for users with access to their workflow, and inactive reports only for their owner and system administrators.

Each report has one owner. To hand a report over, change Report Owner in Modify Report: you lose the right to change it. Before a report owner leaves, a system administrator can find their reports with the Owner filter of the Subscription summary and give them a new owner.

7. What happens at the scheduled hour

Twice an hour, at about 1 and 31 minutes past, TrakIT looks for the subscriptions and query reports due on that day and hour (UTC), and puts each in the report queue once. Send Now puts it in the same queue straight away. A per-entity advanced subscription is queued once per entity.
Every minute, the queue takes the waiting reports, oldest first, generates each one and sends it. If sending fails, it tries again, up to 5 attempts.
TrakIT records Last Sent on the subscription. An advanced report set to keep Sent Only or Sent or Previewed also keeps a copy of the file on its History tab; workflow reports keep only the files users preview.

Nothing is sent, and the queue says why, when:

the report or the subscription is inactive;
no work order matches, or a query report’s query returns no rows, unless Generate Empty Report is on (advanced and query reports);
an email subscription has no recipients;
an advanced report has no filter, or a workflow report no fields.

Every Sunday, system administrators receive a Long Running Reports email listing the reports that took over a minute to generate in the past week, so their filters or fields can be narrowed.

8. Check that reports go out

To find out	Look at
Whether a report went out, and why not	Report queue (Reports > Queue): the Sent time, or the Error in red. Filter on With Errors Only. System administrators can skip an item or re-queue a skipped one.
Which subscriptions nobody receives, or that have not gone out for months	Subscription summary (Reports > Subscription Summary): filter Recipient on With No Recipients, or Last Sent on More than 3 months ago, and export the list.
When one report was last sent and how long it took	The Last Sent and Last Gen columns of its subscriptions. Last Gen turns red above 3 minutes.
Which hours are crowded	Report heatmap, for system administrators.
Which reports you receive or can generate	My Reports (Reports > My Reports).

Users other than system administrators see, on the queue and the summary, only the workflow reports of their workflows and the advanced and query reports they own or were given access to.

9. Pause or stop a report

To	Do this
Pause one subscription	Modify it and clear Active. Or remove its days, to keep it for Preview and Send Now only.
Pause a whole report	Modify Report and clear Active. Users with access can no longer generate it, and other users no longer see it.
Stop it for good	Delete the subscription, or the workflow or advanced report. A report with files on its History tab can’t be deleted: make it inactive instead. Only TrakIT Support deletes query reports.

TrakIT also stops reports that are no longer used:

With Auto Disable on, which new advanced and workflow reports start with, TrakIT checks every Sunday and turns off each subscription whose last report was generated more than 6 months ago. On a query report, Auto Disable turns off the whole report. Previews and API calls count as generating the report. A subscription that has never generated a report is left as it is.
Subscriptions of workflow and advanced reports that have not generated anything for the period set in the data retention policy are deleted, and so are history files older than its Report History period.

10. Fetch a report through the API

Another system can fetch a report when it needs it, instead of receiving it:

Turn on API access: for an advanced report subscription, select Enable API Access in its options and copy its ID with Copy ID; for a query report, ask TrakIT Support to set API Access to Yes.
Ask TrakIT Support for an API key allowed to get the report.
Call AdvReport with the subscription ID, or QueryReport with the report ID.

Each call generates the report there and then, with its filters and format, and is listed in the report queue as API Call. An advanced report must be active. A query report’s parameters sent with the call are saved with the report and used by its scheduled sends too: if the report is also sent on a schedule, ask TrakIT Support for a separate report for the API.

Who can do what

Task	Needs
Create workflow reports	Create in the WorkFlow Reports section, and access to the workflow.
Create advanced reports	Create in the Advanced Reports section. Account fields also need Read in Job Finance.
Open query reports	Read in the Query Reports section. Only TrakIT Support creates them.
Change a report, its subscriptions, recipients and user access	Being its owner, or a system administrator.
See the report queue and the subscription summary	Read in the Report Queue section.
Run interactive reports	Generate Report in the Interactive Reports section.
Set up FTP servers, see the report heatmap, skip or re-queue reports	System administrators.