Reports Overview

This article will cover how to create a report and set up an automation for the report(s) to be sent via email on a regular schedule.

Create a New Report

In the lower right corner select the (+) button to create a new report.

Name the report and select ‘Filtered Event Log’ for the ‘Report Type’.

You will then need to specify the parameters for the:
Date Range, Event Type(s), Columns to Export

Choose a Date Range

You will need to choose a time frame from the drop-down list.

Select Event Type(s)

These are the same events to choose from in the Activity Log

Note: You can select more than one Event (if desired)

Choose Export Columns

Selecting the ‘Export Columns’ is similar to managing the columns/fields view from the Contacts module. For more details click here.

You can even select a ‘Saved View’ to use a pre-existing configuration.

These are the columns/fields of information that will appear in your report.

Choose as many or as few fields as needed. The order these fields appear can be rearranged.

To include/search Deleted Events, select the checkbox.

You can include rules to the report to more specifically filter the results.

Once the report is created, you can download it by selecting the button!

Selecting the ‘Download’ option for that report will immediately download the report.

If you want to set up reports to be emailed on a regular basis, continue the walk-through for how to set up an automation, to automate that process.

Now that the report has been created, let’s create an automation to send the report on a schedule.

Create an Automation.

Go to the Automations Module and select the (+) button in the lower right corner to create a new automation.

Choose ‘Start From Scratch’ when creating a new automation.

Name the Automation

Now let’s build the automation to schedule this report to be sent via email on a scheduled date/time.

Start by clicking and dragging the ‘At Time’ block onto the canvas.

This block is located under the ‘Triggers’ options.

For this particular automation, select ‘Repeating’.

Select the Start/End Date

Select the Repeating frequency, you can even limit it to specific days.

A list of Upcoming Times will be previewed based upon the selections.

Once the At Time block has been set up, next let’s choose the ‘Create Report’ block. This block is located under the ‘Actions’ options.

Select the newly created report.

It will populate with a list that you can search through.

Search or scroll to find the desired report.

Once the report has been selected, it will appear that it is properly linked.

You can see here where it displays the Report URL SmartText: {{ report_url }}

This SmartText is used in the send email block. 

After saving the selected Report, we then want to add the next block.

The next block to add from the ‘Actions’ options is the ‘Select Contacts’ block. Click and drag this block onto the canvas.

For this block, we want to focus on the ‘Limit to Specific Contacts’ fields.

We want to use the email address of the person that wishes to receive the report.

In order to select this specific contact, they need to already exist in the database.

So if the email address is not associated with a contact in the database, it will need to be created.

Once a specific contact is selected, it will appear in a green bubble.

Once the select contacts block has the desired email address included, the last block we want to use is the ‘Send Email’ block.

It will give you the option to choose from Templates, but we want to ‘Start From Scratch’.

For the ‘Send Email’ block, under the ‘Send Settings’, enter the subject for the email, choose an email domain for the email to ‘Send From’, and if you wanted/needed to include more people than what the select contacts block allows for, you can add an account General field that can include multiple email addresses.

Using the SmartText key for this General field is optional.

(Optional)

Under the Account Settings, you can go into the ‘General Fields’, and add the ‘reportemail’ field, and this is the SmartText key that can be used to include these additional email addresses.

In the ‘Rich Content’ portion of the Send Email block, be sure to include the SmartKey Text “{{ report_url }}” as this will generate a link that can be clicked to go to the report generated within the same automation!

This text can be added anywhere within the text portion of the email.

Once the Send Email block has been set up, the last steps are we need to connect each block and enable the automation.

To connect each block, hover over the block, and then from the list of icons beneath the block, click on the arrow, and then drag the arrow to the next block to connect them together. Connect all blocks as shown below.

To enable the automation, click the toggle switch in the upper right corner!

After the automation has run, the number(s) will update to confirm that that part of the automation has been completed. In the example below, we can see that this monthly report has been triggered and run only once.

This completes the walk-through of how to create a report, and have it sent on a regular schedule by using an automation!

Reach out to us at success@patchretention.com with any other questions or concerns!